Rugby League: Cracks starting to appear in the popular code: The 'northern' game strikes at the heart of Melbourne with record-breaking turnout for the State of Origin match

AUSTRALIAN sport was turned on its head yesterday as a record crowd for a rugby league match in the country filled the Melbourne headquarters of the rival code of Australian Rules football.

An attendance of 85,513 for the State Of Origin clash between New South Wales and Queensland at the Melbourne Cricket Ground shattered the old record, for the 1965 Grand Final between St George and South Sydney at the Sydney Cricket Ground, by more than 7,000.

More remarkably still, it happened at the home base of Australian Rules in a city which, until recently, regarded what they, like southern Englishmen, called 'the northern code', with icy indifference. Devotees of Australian Rules have had worse terms for the other game, even to the extent of routinely referring to its scrummaging players as 'bum sniffers'.

All that changed last night, with massive local enthusiasm complementing the influx of NSW and Queensland fans who filled every hotel room within a 50-mile radius of the MCG.

At a time of increasingly blurred sporting boundaries, a match won 14-0 by New South Wales, to draw level in the three-game series, brings closer the day when league will have a club based in what was once seen as the impregnable Victorian heartland.

The confusion of the old certainties is already well advanced. The leaders of league's Winfield Cup competition, Canterbury, played at the NSW rugby union headquarters, Waratah Stadium, for the first time 10 days ago, and plan to move there permanently.

Conversely, Australia will play Ireland at rugby union at the Sydney Football Stadium, the main rugby league ground in Sydney, a city where football means league, on Saturday.

An increasingly expansionist league has already played matches in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth - all Australian Rules strongholds - and is establishing a club in Perth to play next season.

Coming just a week after 54,220 watched Wigan win the World Club Challenge in Brisbane, the Melbourne match confirmed that league is in an unprecedentedly confident mood across a nation previously split by sporting parochialism. And Australian Rules administrators can blame themselves. League officials admit that they would never have developed the motivation to break out of NSW and Queensland if Rules had not planted clubs in league territory in Sydney and Brisbane in the early Eighties.

Last night showed that the counter-attack has developed a momentum that few would have thought possible.

The world record rugby league crowd remains the gate of more than 102,000 at the Challenge Cup final replay between Warrington and Halifax at Odsal Stadium, Bradford, in 1954.