I WAS born in Mumbai, a city that runs on cricket. It is in the air you breathe, the conversations you overhear on local trains, the dreams every kid carries to bed.

I was no different. Growing up, I wanted to be a cricketer, but I was terrible at it. Not just the proper game, but genuinely hopeless at gully cricket, the backyard version played in the streets of India, where even the youngest kids can hold their own.

When I accepted that a playing career wasn't on the cards, I found another way in. At 15, I started doing cricket commentary, and loved it. At my mother's urging, I set my mind on a journalism degree, and the game took me places.

I wrote news articles, fell deeper in love with the sport, and was fortunate enough to work as an associate producer during one cricket season. But even then, while covering sport in Mumbai, I had a bigger dream quietly sitting in the back of my mind; Australia, and the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

I had wanted to go there since I was eight years old, watching tri-series games between India, Australia and Sri Lanka. To me, from hundreds of miles away, the MCG was not just a stadium, but the cathedral of cricket. I wanted to sit in the media box, with a laptop, covering a Test match from the ground I had watched on television my entire life.

In 2023, I packed my bags and moved to Melbourne to study a master's in journalism, and with a clear plan in mind: gain local media knowledge, understand cricket in Australia, and walk into that media box.

My plan lasted only a few days.

The first thing I learned was that cricket in Australia is a summer sport. I had known this intellectually, of course, but knowing it and feeling it are very different things. The second thing I learned was that for the other half of the year, Melbourne belongs entirely to Australian football. Not just casually; obsessively, completely, and with a devotion I had only ever seen Indians give to cricket. I was stunned. I had come here for cricket, and cricket was on holiday.

Being honest, I panicked a little. Most Indian-Australians I met in Melbourne loved cricket as much as I did, which made the AFL feel even more foreign. I didn't know the rules, didn't know the players, didn't even know how the scoring worked. For a sports journalist, it was a deeply uncomfortable place to be.

Then, in 2024, a friend who was a Melbourne Demons supporter asked if I wanted to come to a game against Geelong. I said yes, mostly out of curiosity. What happened that evening at the MCG is something I have written about before, and I will not re-tell it in full here. The short version is a stranger jumped into my photo, the crowd pulled me in like I was one of their own, and when the Dees won, I stood there in the middle of thousands of strangers who felt like anything but. I went home that night and made a decision. I was going to learn this sport inside and out, and find a way to work in it.

I reached out to people in the industry, including at the AFL itself, and the first piece of advice I received changed everything: watch as much footy as you can. So I did.

I started watching games, sometimes going to the ground alone, asking strangers to explain what was happening on the field, even asking people which team I should support. Gradually, the confusion gave way to understanding, and understanding gave way to something that felt a lot like the love I'd always had for cricket.

In 2025, through my connections at AFL House, I was asked to cover Anzac Day at the MCG. I walked into that ground not as a spectator but as someone there to work, and I remember thinking about the eight-year-old boy in Mumbai who had dreamed of this moment, just for an entirely different sport.

Later that year, I was asked to cover AFLW matches. This may sound dramatic, but when I was handed my media accreditation, I had tears in my eyes. When I had first landed in this country and was trying to break into the industry, a hiring manager told me that because English was not my first language, I would struggle to meet the standards of an English-language publication. Having grown up attending an English-medium school in India, where all lessons were taught in English, and having worked as an English-speaking journalist my entire career, that comment stung in a way that still stays with me.

And yet here was a sport, a deeply Australian sport, that had never once made me feel like an outsider. The people who guided me never questioned where I was from or how I spoke. They just asked whether I was willing to learn and work hard. I was.

In cricket, the passion and curiosity used to give me goosebumps. And now footy gives me that same feeling, but every 30 seconds, because the game can change even in the last moment before the final siren. Watching Nick Daicos glide through a pack like a football is on a string attached to his boot, making decisions in a few seconds that most people could not make in an hour, I realised this sport is built entirely on those moments that make your stomach drop. Cricket taught me to appreciate patience before an explosion. For me, Australian football has become that explosion, all the time.

I still love cricket. I always will. It is woven into who I am in a way that can't change. But footy has become something I did not expect it to be. As strange as it sounds, working in this sport feels like something I was always supposed to do, even if I had to travel to the other side of the world to get here.

They say sport has no boundaries, and I used to think that was just something people said. I came to Australia chasing a dream that had the MCG at its centre. It turns out the MCG had more than one dream waiting for me. 

Jainarayan Tiwari works for the AFL Digital Network