Who is this playing you ask? It's Richmond-Greater Western Sydney, you moron. Who else did you think we were here to see?

Oh, you mean who is playing that song? No idea, but whoever they are it must have been a brief career.

Yes, today I will assume the curmudgeon role ordinarily occupied by Greg Baum. He would be here in this newspaper space but he was rendered speechless.

On Saturday the MCG was witness to the largest partisan crowd football has seen at a game.

The mood was tense for weeks in the build-up and reached a fidgety, fretful peak in the lead-up to the bounce. A once-mighty team had rediscovered their might after decades of feasting on their own body parts and now stood at the threshold of something great. They are about the league's most vocal and they had come in unprecedented number.

The anticipation bordered on a psychological condition. For the non-partisan and partisan alike the attraction to the game was as much the experience of what it was like to be in a crowd of this type as it was to witness the play on the ground.

So it was with a sense of dismay the preamble was met with scratchy muzak as someone felt that 95,000 people in the one place was not enough to build excitement and tension.

It was more disappointing to have a goal celebrated with a screechy rendition of a song over the PA. Maybe someone didn't like the idea of the small GWS contingent in the crowd being drowned out by the braying Tigers or the deathly silence of the underwhelmed. Yet part of the amusement and joy of games in parochially hostile Perth or Adelaide is the silence for a foreigner's goal.

This determined boosterism reached its most ridiculous when Harry Himmelberg kicked a goal after the final siren for GWS and the losing side's music played joyously for the goal ahead of the winning Tigers' theme song. There's a time and place for all things and this was not the time nor the place for the Giants' admittedly stirring eastern European chant of a theme song.

The AFL has wanted clubs to own stadiums for home games and be inventive to improve the fan experience and it is a worthy sentiment that has delivered some excellent innovations. This just was not one of them.

Just as Richie Benaud appreciated, sometimes you say much when you say nothing. Never get in the way of the game, just let it be.