THE SCOTSMAN REPORTS
Edinburgh look to lure floating support
DAVID FERGUSON

EDINBURGH'S new managing director, Graeme Stirling, is bidding to persuade supporters north of the Forth to switch allegiance from Glasgow to the Gunners.

Fans as far north as Aberdeen have become regulars at Glasgow games since the Caledonia Reds team (the successor to the old North & Midlands region) was merged with Glasgow in 1998. But Stirling points to the fact that the trip from Fife, Tayside and further up the east coast to Murrayfield can be shorter than one to Glasgow's Hughenden ground.
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"We have invited presidents and secretaries from clubs from across Edinburgh and Fife and the midlands to come along to the game tomorrow night [against Leinster], following on from an invite we sent out for the pre-season match with Leeds.

"We had a reasonable response to that and the people that came met us and I think they realised we were serious in our intentions to bring the rugby community on board.

"Whether people want to come to us because we're closer than another team, or because we're more successful, we will do what we can to make Edinburgh the biggest, best-supported and most successful team not just in Scotland but in this league.

"My own children were Glasgow supporters, but, obviously, now I'm at Edinburgh I persuaded them to come with me to watch the team and they loved the occasion and wanted to come back. They are a test case, if you like, of what we need to do to attract new supporters and the many supporters of rugby, generally, to come along and watch pro rugby in Scotland."

As he prepares for his first Magners League match at Murrayfield tomorrow night, against a Leinster side without its top Irish stars but loaded with foreign internationals, the poor attendances at the Borders' and Glasgow's opening matches last Friday will have further underlined to Stirling the need to tap into as many markets as possible.

The Borders actually improved on last season's opening gate by around 300, but a crowd of just 1,250 is woefully short of what is required to ease the threat of going out of existence.

Glasgow attracted over 1,600, but that is similarly pitiful compared with the 4,000 Hughenden generated in the recent past and which is required to make the team a viable prospect.

There are understood to be several new marketing initiatives in the pipeline, but the SRU might find more and more supporters heading from the west and south to Murrayfield, to watch the team they no longer control.

This article was posted on 7-Sep-2006, 07:11 by Hugh Barrow.