do-or-die round of 32 clash against Egypt<\/a> kicking off at 4am.<\/p>\nTo ease the pain of the early rise, free hot breakfast will be served to the first 10,000 fans through the gates at AAMI Park. <\/p>\n
Doors open at 2am, with ham and cheese toasties, croissants, vegetarian quiche, cheese and bacon pies and breakfast sausage rolls all at no cost.<\/p>\n
Melbourne Park chief executive John Harnden said the initiative would help create \u201ca memorable live site experience\u201d and \u201can electric atmosphere at AAMI Park as fans unite behind the Socceroos\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cI also want to thank the many thousands of fans who have come through our gates to celebrate this historic moment for Australian sport,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
More than 27,000 fans packed AAMI Park across the Socceroos\u2019 first three matches, with further crowds filling live sites in Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong, Traralgon and Shepparton. Federation Square reached its 7000-person capacity for all three group stage matches, with overflow fans directed to AAMI Park.<\/p>\n
A Federation Square spokesman told the Herald Sun last week that security had been \u201creviewed\u201d and \u201cstrengthened\u201d following a number of incidents during Australia\u2019s clash with the US. <\/p>\n
Despite this, security officers were overwhelmed on Friday morning, forced to open the live site an hour early after fans pushed through barriers, let off flares and threw water bottles. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Queensland is set to pip Melbourne to host the Socceroos\u2019 first match on home soil after the World Cup, with Australia to face Brazil twice later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Victorians have been given an extra reason to get out of bed early to cheer on Australia at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[260],"class_list":["post-40179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-melbourne","tag-melbourne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}