“Ah sees it, but ah don’t believes it!” So said the grouchy gunslinger “Yosemite Sam”, and so too the hard-nosed Carlton half-back Andrew McKay the night the scoreboard self-combusted at the MCG.

It was around 7.30 on the evening of August 27, 1999 - Round 22 versus Richmond - and Macka, in game No.150, was limbering up just moments before the opening bounce.

“For some unknown reason I was having shots at goal at the Ponsford Stand end, so I was actually facing the scoreboard when I suddenly saw these sparks... I thought ‘That’s a bit strange’,” McKay, now Carlton’s general manager - football operations said.

“Quite literally about 30 seconds later smoke started billowing out, and then flames, and I thought ‘Oh God’. The smoke seemed to hang around in the arena and there was a lot of it”.

McKay remembered that team members were then hastily called back into the room as old tinhead turned into an inferno.

“We had to wait in the rooms for the smoke to clear and the fire to be put out before we actually came back out. The game was delayed, I remember that.”

The first bounce was put back 25 minutes as the MFB went about their work, and the night didn’t get any better for ‘Macka’ either. Carlton finished 11 points adrift of the Tigers with the appropriately nicknamed “Big Red” booting four.

“I remember we got rolled and I also remember it for another reason,” McKay said. “One of my friend’s kids ran out as the mascot that night. He was obviously only a young kid then, but when we got ready to go back out after the flames were doused he said to his Dad ‘does that mean I get to run out again?’.”