Murrayfield still little better than Hampden

The SFA should come to BT Murrayfield. Almost everybody says so.

I’m not quite sure where the avid national affection for Hampden Park of my youth was lost but it certainly seems to be gone now. After every game there these days, a torrent of complaints flood Twitter and fan websites.

Now the SFA are thinking about using the club grounds and even the biggest stadium in the country, Scottish Rugby’s 67,000 capacity facility in the west end of Edinburgh. Hearts have been enjoying their time there while Tynecastle’s main stand was getting rebuilt. Celtic played European games there successfully.

As someone who does much of their winter day job at EH12, I’m slightly bemused by this. Because Murrayfield isn’t a very good stadium by anyone’s estimation, not even for rugby.

The SRU were lauded when they redeveloped Murrayfield in 1991. Truth was, they were premature and it was a colossal mistake. The union funded the project entirely themselves and plunged into epochal debt, worsened when rugby went professional just four years later.

On top of that, stadium design and – most importantly – methods of funding them changed irrevocably with staggering speed. It meant that when the Welsh RU built the Millennium (now Principality) Stadium less than a decade later they got a huge whack of it paid for by government agencies.

In Ireland, they spent pennies on a crumbling Lansdowne Road for another decade, investing in pro rugby on the pitch with spectacular success. Then the IRFU cashed in, redeveloping the old ground into the shiny new Aviva, with most of the bill footed by the Irish government and the soccer association.

It’s not as if what the SRU were left with after their redevelopment was that great anyway. There are hospitality facilities, but they are 1990s spec, not 21st Century; only a handful of boxes look out on to the pitch. There is no space for decent sized video boards.

The West (Main) Stand, incredibly, was built with room for an eight-lane running track between it and the pitch, for reasons lost in the mists of time.

It’s further from the front seats to the pitch than even at Hampden. The design of the stadium is so inflexible that there’s no way around shortening this distance, other than demolishing the West Stand and starting again.

The end stands are square to the pitch, but Murrayfield’s famously vast 20-metre in-goal areas for rugby mean the soccer posts are as far away as well. If soccer is coming because Hampden’s pitch is too far from the stands and the atmosphere suffers, they’re really just be swapping like for like.

It’s more likely the SFA are attracted by those 67,000 seats, and Murrayfield does work better in public transport links (but certainly is no better for cars). There’s plenty space around the structure for fan zones, even when the SRU finally build their planned hotel within the grounds.

Taking the international soccer team around the country is a laudable aim. But Celtic Park is already a better venue than Murrayfield and Ibrox was possibly more atmospheric as a rugby venue when it hosted the Commonwealth Games sevens.

If the football authorities want to come on board with the rugby as happens in Wales and Ireland, by all means. Let’s pool resources and rebuild the West Stand properly, then you’d have a 21st Century stadium worthy of the international teams of both codes.

But Murrayfield is not that stadium right now.