But Sunday isn't most days in the life of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a cathedral of belonging to host Australia and New Zealand in the ICC Cricket World Cup final – evoking deep memories of Trevor Chappell, and an underarm ball that fairly caused a diplomatic furore, on this very ground – before the boundary rope is furled, goalposts erected, and the grass readied for the first studded boots of autumn. A season turns, and in four days a city's most hallowed turf has some costume change.

In this week of bruised clouds hanging low over Melbourne, with the first golden teardrops on English elms in Yarra Park, the sward of cool-season ryegrass in the middle of the MCG has been quietly tended, quite literally, to within less than an inch of its life.

"We mow the grass daily to 10 millimetres during the cricket season to make it a fast field," says Gordon, raised in Iowa, with a background in golf courses. "For the football season we let it grow to about 28 millimetres and only cut it on match day, and once during the week in autumn and spring."

The job takes about an hour-and-a-half – depending on the clippings – and links a tradition that dates to 1853 when Governor La Trobe granted four hectares of land in a hollow of the old Police Paddock to the Melbourne Cricket Club. It was "a lovely piece of bushland" where "the grass in places was knee-deep".

Twenty-two yards (20.12 metres) of cricket wicket was marked among the river gums and before even Eureka Stockade a contested space was found.

On Sunday night, after the last cricket flannels of summer leave the field, the first three of the centre pitch's seven drop-in wickets will be removed, in a midnight hoist that will close Brunton Avenue until nearly Monday sunrise. Each pitch weighs about 32 tonnes, lifted in 24 metre by 3 metre steel baskets laden 200 millimetres deep with a rich and black potting mix known otherwise as Merri Creek soil.

A boundary line is chalked – five metres in from the fence; two metres in from a skirt of new synthetic turf laid as part of the ground's recent $1.7 million resurfacing works – the ground's mown chequerboard squares are enlarged, and all is about ready for another game that shapes the social rhythms of a city.

From the beginning, this parochial football code was partly about grass. "[I]t would be of a vast benefit to any cricketground to be trampled upon," wrote the city's founding sportsman, Tom Wills, in his feted 1858 letter to Bell's Life in Victoria. In advocating for football, he said it "would make the turf quite firm and durable".

For the March 29 one-day cricket final, Gordon and his six ground staff have prepared the outfield with a mix of granular and liquid fertiliser, a long leap from the "200 loads of well-rotted manure" spread on the grounds' English grasses in 1862. Nowadays, the 1.9 hectares of turf comes in large plastic-backed sheets, laid on a 265-millimetre sand bed with gravel below. The perennial ryegrass is a laboratory concoction, sold as "Striker Regenerator" and, according to trade notes, featuring "dark-green turf colour, a fine leaf texture and excellent autumn density."

That is, in the calm before the crowds – before the cauldron fills with a city – the grass looks as green and trim as billiard baize, and in perfect nick for a field thought of as the nation's spiritual backyard.

Footballers then tramp all over it. "I don't care much about who wins the game," Gordon says. "All I see is what they're doing to the turf."