It has long been an ambition of the power-brokers at Murrayfield to have greater involvement in the national game.
A succession of courtships and flirtations have taken place across various regimes over the last 30 years with mixed degrees of warmth.
More than two decades have elapsed since I was invited to provide media input into what proved the highly successful first staging of a rugby match on a professional football ground when Scotland A met Italy at the then new McDiarmid Park.
St Johnstone's home ground would play host to many more and the likes of Ibrox, Pittodrie and Hampden itself have also staged international rugby in the interim, while Murrayfield has been utilised for a fair few football matches in the intervening years.
As one former Scottish Rugby Union president who was involved in commercial discussions through the nineties and has taken almost perverse pleasure in recounting down the years, however, the regular discussions regarding the use of Murrayfield for international football at that time would be engaged in politely, before then SFA chief executive Jim Farry would make it privately clear that there would be no chance of it happening on his watch.
These are different times, however, and the improvements on the commercial side of the Murrayfield operation that have seen the SRU’s debt drop significantly, have encouraged a more bullish approach among its executives at a time when the SFA has not had its troubles to seek.
The way they go about their business internally is, admittedly, currently under intense scrutiny, but chief operating officer Dominic McKay sought to betray not the slightest lack of confidence this week when, while repeatedly stressing that his organisation has a high regard for the SFA, he made it clear that Scottish Rugby believes it knows how to make events attractive in a way that football has yet to learn, when observing: “I love my football, but for a long time and the same with rugby, we are guilty of assuming that you simply put games on and people turn up.
"There are so many different distractions for young people and it’s very expensive, that you need to offer them something special and it needs to be broader than the 90 minutes.”
In saying so he pointed to the commercial benefits to be gained for the SFA by making full use of “the largest stadium that can generate the largest return that goes back into football.”
Yet the timing has become all the more interesting of late, since close scrutiny of plans for the football-rugby relationship to work the other way around when the coming season’s PRO14 Grand Final takes place at Celtic Park – with the use of the neighbouring Emirates Arena to create a fanzone – may well provide a template that could be copied for major football occasions at the same venue or elsewhere in Glasgow.
McKay’s choice of analogy was, meanwhile, an interesting one when he borrowed from yet another sport in comparing the bidding process with a 400 metre race, observing that they are now in the finishing straight and suggesting they now have a clear run to the line, having negotiated all the various obstacles placed in their way.
This is no contest played to Olympian ideals, however, with silver and bronze medals offering solace to those finishing second and third since in seeking to become landlords to the guardians of Scottish football. As rugby seeks to achieve even more than it was attempting to back when Jim Farry proved so resistant to its charms, this is a race which could, in terms of the long-term power balance in Scottish sport, prove to be a winner-takes-all event.
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