Popularity
Rugby union is not the national sport in Scotland, being far behind football. It is most popular in the Borders region where it is played widely, although even here ground is being lost to football with professionalism and migration contributing to the challenges facing the game . In the rest of the country rugby tends to be played mainly by private schools.
Whilst attendances at club matches in Scotland are fairly poor, the national team draws a sizeable crowd to Murrayfield for Six Nations matches. Some traditionalists claim that in recent years the national rugby union team has become a focal point for football-type sporting nationalism.
Aside from Murrayfield, there are few major rugby stadiums in Scotland. Many clubs in the Scottish Borders have grandstands and city sides in Edinburgh and Glasgow also have seated, covered stands.
Read more about this topic: Rugby Union In Scotland
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
—Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)