EDINBURGH ARE CLOSE to agreeing a ground-share deal with Hibernian, with a view to moving out of Murrayfield.
The Challenge Cup runners-up are expected to play a couple of games at the football ground in the coming season to test the waters, before committing to a permanent ground-share.
Edinburgh currently play their home games at the 67,000 all-seater Murrayfield, but are looking for a smaller stadium to play in.
Taking aside their traditional New Year meeting with rivals Glasgow which attracted nearly 16,000 people to the national stadium, Edinburgh averaged just over 3,700 fans per home game in the Pro 12 this season.
With capacity of 20,241 at Hibs’ Easter Road, it would provide a much more suitable environment.
Scottish Rugby Chief Executive Mark Dodson told the BBC that they are planning to stage some games at the ground in the coming season, before examining the logistics of a permanent move.
“We’re closer to that than we have been for a while. Our hope would be that we can have a couple of games as a test with a view to moving there,” he said.
Dodson added that regardless of the outcome with Easter Road, finding Edinburgh Rugby a new home away from Murrayfield is vital.
“We hope we can come to some sort of arrangement for the coming season,” added Dodson.”We can’t stay at Murrayfield for the longer term,” he added.
Edinburgh last played at Easter Road during the 1998/99 season, when they played two Heineken Cup games at the football stadium.
About time! Murrayfield is dreary and cold at the best of times when no one is there for pro12 games it’s even worse. Interesting to see if Easter Road pitch will take the additional games. Hope it works out for Edinburgh. Scottish Rugby is pretty low now outside of Glasgow! Would be nice to have another club to add to both existing pro 12′s.
Good move for “Embra” after Glasgow showed the way with their own relative success in their stadium-switch and now have decent, passionate support and finally a successful team. So hopefully Embra see similar decent attendances and relative success, which will be good for raising the value and merit of the Pro12 League.
As an Edinburgh resident, I’m very excited by this news. I long ago gave up on going to Murrayfield to watch Edinburgh: it was a thoroughly demoralising experience to be surrounded by 64,000 empty seats at each game. The rugby was generally crap, too.
Murrayfield is fantastic in the 6N when it is crammed and in full voice, but has always been a major handicap to developing Edinburgh Rugby.
Easter Road is a really nice ground – very close to the pitch. The corners are all open, so swirling winds will be interesting!
Hard to make any money when renting a stadium.
Even harder to make money when:
a. No-one goes to your games because the atmosphere is abysmal
b. You never win anything because even your players are dejected taking the field in an empty concrete bowl
I think it would be a good call by Edinburgh to make the switch to smaller ground to get the ground buzzing and get the passionate Scots behind there team, maybe looking at what Leinster did and do renting the RDS then take the crowd to the Aviva for big matches, Murrayfield for the Heineken cup matches quarter finals and stuff. Good call.
Edinburgh in a quarter final??
Remember they knocked out Toulouse a few years back in a quarter final
Edinburgh were in the quarter final a few years back and knocked out Toulouse