A former Hearts footballer who became a Scottish rugby great as part of the 1984 Grand Slam winning team has warned the club’s supporters that they face a major task to re-create their traditional home advantage when they host matches at Murrayfield.
In an interview with The Hearts Foundation, David Johnston, who made his debut for Hearts 40 years ago, but then switched codes to establish himself in the Scotland XV just two years later, admitted to finding it strange to see his football team playing at the home of Scottish rugby, but urged supporters to embrace the experience.
“It is a bit surreal,” said Johnston.
“It’s happened for a couple of European games and I really hope supporters take to it because it can be a great stadium, but the supporters have to make it a great stadium. I’m away quite a bit but I will try to come along.”
However drawing on his own memory of the two grounds he thinks the Murrayfield lay-out will make it hard for Hearts to make home advantage count to the full.
“I’m often asked about the contrast and my first international rugby match was (in 1979) against New Zealand, who are the best in the world,” he recalled.
“In those days you couldn’t fill Murrayfield, but I was much more nervous. I’d played against New Zealand for Edinburgh two weeks or 10 days earlier, so I knew who I was playing against. Murrayfield wasn’t full, you couldn’t fill it for autumn internationals in those days.
“There was no comparison between Murrayfield and Tynecastle. Tynecastle was incredible, the noise that would it be 20,000, 22,000 or 24,000, full for the first game of the season… the atmosphere, everybody was so much closer to the pitch.
“When I played at Murrayfield there was probably seventy odd thousand if not more when it came to the Five Nations as it would have been in 1980, but there was only one stand, so most of the noise went straight up in the air. I used to tell this to my pals who are Hearts supporters and say, ‘look, you guys make much more noise at Tynecastle than you do at Murrayfield,’ and they’d say ‘no, we make exactly the same noise because it just goes up in the air, because there were the sweeping stands and terracings, nothing to keep the noise in, whereas at Tynecastle it’s much more compact.”
Murrayfield has, of course, been rebuilt since Johnston’s playing days and turned into an all-seated venue, but ahead of Hearts’ meeting with Aberdeen at the rugby ground, ahead of a sequence of 10 successive matches they will play in Edinburgh, he thinks the fundamental difference between the grounds remains.
“I really felt the atmosphere on the pitch when I was playing at Tynecastle, whereas Murrayfield to this day, when it is full and bouncing it’s great, but it takes some doing to get it that way,” he said.
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