Kiwi Roaming

The Australian Open is a massive event for Melbourne in January. You can buy a ground pass and during the first week / early rounds to gain access to games to both the event precinct and to games on smaller courts. You can also buy tickets to Margaret Court Arena, Rod Laver and the lower seating blocks in John Cain Arena (the upper blocks you can queue for).

With a ground pass you get access to a game by queueing at doors, which are located all the way around each stadium / court. The precinct itself is massive – absolutely massive. The ground pass also gives you access to sit in deck chairs or on lawns and watch matches on big screens. There are bars, food courts, an enormous kids activities area, another area altogether with DJ’s and gigs. It’s a cacophony of things to do and see. BUT it’s also jam packed with over 100,000 people there each day and you feel like you’re constantly battling the crowds to get anywhere.

We went on Day 2 and Day 5 (as of when I write this) bother offering different experiences for us and both great fun. We even bumped into people we know from Wellington – random I know.

Getting to see the matches you are interested in with a ground pass is all about having a plan and moving quickly we found. The other great advice from Don and Sophie was to sit on the city side where you will be in the shade – best advice.

Day 2 – this is the day we met Ben for lunch so got to the AO precinct about 2pm, we walked straight in which was fantastic after seeing all the media about very long entry queues. Don and Sophie also told us about getting wrist bands to get into John Cain so we headed up to the place these were dished out and were told by the volunteers we were lucky to arrive when we did and miss the queues for these too.

Forgot to mention there are thousands of volunteers, offering advice, answering questions, directing the traffic. So many chatty friendly people.

We wanted to see Stan Wawrinka’s (maybe) final match which was on at the wonderful Kia Arena. We joined a city side queue and when the match prior finished were let in, we had no idea what the system was once in, so grabbed two seats at the end of a row with a fantastic view. Kia Arena was there for Stan and the atmosphere was very exciting, we did feel for his opponent (Laslo Djere from Serbia) who got no love whatsoever from the very vocal crowd. Being at the end of a row we were a bit trapped and ran out of water set 3, luckily it only went to 4 sets so we got out and refilled bottles at one of the plentiful water stations. Stan won and lived to see another round.

Along with water stations there are loads of cooling stations where fans are spraying a mist of very cold water into the air, on these stinking hot days they both keep the overall temperature in the vicinity down, and they also allow people to stand directly in front to cool off.

FYI the image top left below, Don took a screenshot of a crowd and found us!

The John Cain wristbands only work from 4:30-5:30pm and it was well after when we left Kia so we thought we’d go see what the queues were like there first, only to be told by a lovely volunteer that allocation was exhausted so not to bother. From here we went to find food and walked around the outer courts. We also went to Margaret Court for the downstairs loos – turns out everyone else was doing the same so queued for a little while. Margaret Court and Rod Laver are connected with a huge concourse with food places, loos and bars. There were thousands of people walking around so we felt like we were walking against the flow no matter what we did.

After checking out the smaller courts and discovering some of them have virtually no spectator space, we went to one where the whole crowd was there supporting a Japanese player with their flags waving everywhere. Others were jammed so we chanced a small queue at ANZ arena and got in there no trouble, here we watched a women’s match – Elise Mertens of Belgium vs Lanlana Tararudee of Thailand. While the relative rankings made it an unbalanced first round match the Australian crowd got behind the underdog and the Thai player responded with some great tennis.

The things you don’t see on the TV but do in person were fascinating, how quickly the changeovers happen, the shift changes of line judges, of ball boys/girls. The ball boy/girls protocols and procedures are fascinating to watch, they are so diligent and well trained so it’s fascinating to watch. The media and cameras, in the Wawrinka match as it got more likely he was going to win more cameras arrived for instance.

We loved the whole experience of our first day, and enjoyed the walk back along the river to the train station on a clear warm evening (along with 100,000 other people).

Day 5 – after hours spent discussing and looking at tickets we decided to buy a ground pass again for the night session. It was Don’s first day working so we wanted to be home as backup for Sophie during the day. So we headed off about 3:45 and got to the gate right on 5pm when our tickets allow entry. It was busy but we didn’t have to wait to get in.

OMG once through the gates it was madness! absolute bedlam. We wanted to see the Cilic vs Shapovalov who is 21st seed. So we made a beeline for the 1573 arena and queued on the city side – we’ve found people are lazy and if there is a door far away from the main path the queues there are smaller. We got in and got seats near the baseline but still a great view. This was the worst match ever, both players were double faulting, both were making unforced errors, both played terribly. Cilic who was potentially also playing his last AO match, won in 3 sets. The crowd couldn’t get into it but once he won the Croatian crowd went nuts singing and chanting, cheering for their hero. I was sitting next to three men who had Rod Laver tickets but were Canadian so felt they needed to stay for Shapovalov – one of them said as we walked out “I’m Canadian and that was embarrassing” summed the match up pretty much.

We had taken snacks so didn’t need much dinner so while Steve queued for the loos I got us some overpriced dumplings and we headed to John Cain “on the off chance” we could get in. The security guard tried to dissuade us saying there were only single seats but a group who had just left convinced us to go up saying there were heaps of seats. There weren’t heaps but there were enough we got two near the far end of a row.

To get here we had to navigate the massive – hours long – queues for KIA Arena where Warwrinka was winning a 5 setter and people were waiting for an all Australian mens doubles match after that. With the draw spread over 3 days in the first round and the same in the second round/third rounds, it means for ground passes there aren’t many matches in the evenings to watch.

The match we watched in John Cain was 9th seed Taylor Fritz vs Vit Kopriva of Czechia who is about 101 seed. The scoreline doesn’t really reflect the match, again the Australian crowd were supporting the underdog and the Czechian player got better and stronger as the match went on. There were some great rallies as well as Fritz winning games with 4 aces – so quite mixed and great tennis.

I should also mention it got cold on day 5, 18C in the sun then down to 14C after sunset. We had one extra layer but this wasn’t good and we were chilly. With matches in progress and queues waiting to get into them we decided to head home.

Footnote: we now have tickets for Australia Day at Margaret Court! 4th round.