Union happy for Murrayfield to host Hearts v Hibs cup semi

The Scottish Rugby Union would be open to hosting the Hearts v Hibernian Scottish Cup semi-final at Murrayfield as and when sport gets back up and running.

The capital clash was due to take place at Hampden last month but was postponed when all football was suspended as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Rod Petrie, the Scottish Football Association president, pictured, has floated the possibility of the rescheduled semi-final being played in Edinburgh to prevent up to 50,000 football fans travelling through to Glasgow.

Dominic Mckay, the SRU chief operating officer, said: “I saw that report and we’ve got a proud history of hosting football games,

whether it’s Liverpool last year against Napoli or Hearts playing a number of home games.

“If there was an opportunity to play football games at Murrayfield we’d be very happy to do that.”

Mckay attended a meeting with the Scottish government on Tuesday with SFA chief executive Neil Doncaster and added: “One of the things we spoke about was strategic locations across Scotland earmarked as locations for sport resuming.

“Murrayfield lends itself beautifully to being a sporting bubble because we have training facilities, we have a gym and we have the stadium itself to host games. The whole environment and campus lends itself to being a sporting bubble. If that can be used by other sports, we’d be delighted to do that because genuinely collaboration is the name of the game at the moment, to help each other step by step get sport restarted.”