Amid the carnage in Paris on Friday, what happened at the Stade de France was a triumph of calm and good sense on a mass scale.

An attacker wearing a suicide vest and carrying a ticket for the soccer friendly between France and Germany was frisked by a guard at the entrance, who felt the suicide vest he was wearing under his clothes. As he tried to back away, the would-be terrorist detonated his vest.

It's speculated that his aim was to detonate his vest inside and then panic the crowd into a stampede that could easily have claimed hundreds of lives in a stadium where French President Francois Hollande was also watching the match.

But as two other attackers, another outside the stadium and one at a nearby McDonald's, also set off their explosive devices, authorities at the 80,000 seat arena made a brave decision: it would be safer to let the match continue without an announcement than try to evacuate thousands of panicked fans.

It proved to be the second right decision of the night; the first having been the guard's lone decision to block the attacker.

As the game played on, Mr Hollande was whisked away from the stadium. It was only at halftime in the match that the coaches were briefed on the attacks around the city.

French coach Didier Deschamps and his German counterpart Joachim Low decided against passing on that information to the players.

"It was so weird," Cyril Olivès-Berthet, a French reporter covering the match, told The New York Times. "The players were running and doing their game, and the fans were chanting their normal chants, 'Aux Armes, Aux Armes,' a typical chant that is a warrior thing about taking arms and going to war. When France scored the second goal late in the game, they all waved their flags, and the players celebrated like they always do."

But once the match had ended, the horror of the situation gradually dawned on those inside. German players huddled around television sets, while the French team was briefed inside the locker rooms, sending some players into a frantic check on loved ones.

The thousands of fans were then concentrated out of just two exits, causing bottlenecks. As police changed the protocol in one area, hundreds of fans ran back into the stadium, seemingly terrified.

With concerns about the safety of the two team buses running high, the teams were kept inside the stadium for some time; the French players were eventually taken by bus to their training centre outside of Paris at about 3am, while the Germans stayed overnight, leaving the stadium for the airport at 7am.

Official figures suggest that throughout the whole drama, three separate bombs saw the death of only one civilian.

The event has provoked security reviews at stadiums here in Melbourne, as the busy cricket season gears up. MCG spokesman Shane Brown said security procedures would be reviewed in the aftermath of the terror attacks, and advice would be sought from relevant authorities about whether measures needed to be increased.

A spokesman for Etihad stadium, also in Melbourne, said officials spoke regularly with Victoria Police before, after and during events and would continue to be diligent with bag checks.