PHIL Smith, the head coach of BT Cup Finalists Heriot’s, has called for admission to the showcase occasion to be free in future years.

Tickets for this year’s finals day on Saturday at Murrayfield are reasonably priced at £10 for adults and £5 concessions, and there are six finals in all - the men’s Cup, Shield and Bowl, and the women’s Cup, Plate and Bowl. When the event began 20 years ago it attracted crowds of over 20,000, but more recent figures have been around 8,000.

The fall in attendances has been partly due to club rugby’s loss of its best players to the professional ranks, but Smith believes the decline can be reversed with a bit of imagination and hard work. “Make it free,” he said yesterday. “And maybe people would just walk up because they know it’s a free entry.”

At present clubs get to keep all the money from tickets they sell, but there is no prize money for winning any of the finals. Smith thinks that introducing prize money would compensate clubs for the loss of funds from ticket sales, although he is sure, in any case, that the prospect of attracting a far bigger crowd would still give them an incentive to distribute as many tickets as possible.

“The benefit that the clubs get from the cup final is they get to keep their gate receipts [from] any tickets we sell,” he said. “There’s no prize money.

“And put prize money, would be an option. Basically, you can walk into any place and hand out a bunch of tickets and say ‘It’s free entry on Saturday, come along’ - and maybe put prize money as the reward for the clubs rather than us running around trying to sell tickets to all and sundry.

“I don’t know how much people will have been aware of the club game more recently,” he continued. “Because up till Christmas it was kind of in your face and we were playing every week, which was great. Now it’s become a bit disjointed - you’re playing then stopping, playing then stopping.

“But certainly as a club we’re trying our best to get as many people along as we can. And I’m sure Melrose will be doing the same.”

John Dalziel, the Melrose coach, said that more had to be done to promote both finals day and club rugby as a whole. “I remember my first time here was with Gala in 1999. What an occasion it was: we had about 18 or 20,000 here. In terms of my whole career I look back on that day as probably the biggest in your whole life.

“We’ve got to really publicise it. We’ve got to publicise the club game a bit more - we’ve got some really fantastic players now. There are some really good players here and we need to showcase it.”

Saturday’s action starts at 11am with the men’s Bowl final between Millbrae and Aberdeen University, while the last game of the day, the Cup final between Heriot’s and Melrose, kicks off at 5.45pm.