This weekend’s fare at the national stadium may be overshadowed by Six Nations Championship action elsewhere, but Edinburgh are hoping the importance of their meeting with Cardiff Blues will still galvanise their growing support base.

The match takes place on Saturday evening which, as Edinburgh’s assistant coach Duncan Hodge admitted yesterday, threatens to have an impact on their attendance, following on from an afternoon of live televised rugby which begins with Scotland in action and continues with what could be a title decider.

“You want to play in front of as many people as possible, so it’s a big ask for people to watch Scotland-France, then Wales-England and then get off your sofa and come to Murrayfield, but hopefully people do,” he said.

“We’ve been going well, we’ve got a good home record, so hopefully we get a big crowd, the weather’s good and that’ll really help us as a team. So, let’s hope people come and watch.”

With home advantage they will be favourites to overcome a team that allowed Edinburgh’s Scottish rivals Glasgow Warriors to bring a full haul of five points home from the Welsh capital last weekend, while showing their own capacity to rattle in tries, both sides registering five in the end.

“It was an entertaining game to watch,” said Hodge.

“Cardiff are a good side, they’ve got some really good attackers. They’re quite quirky in defence… they put a lot of pressure on the ball. They’re quite hard to analyse, but they’re a good side and obviously they’ve got an ability to score points.”

While it was the way that Cardiff finished that saw them come close to pulling off a remarkable win against Glasgow, what Edinburgh will be looking to guard against is a repeat of the way they started against the Dragons last weekend, when they found themselves 17-14 down at the interval before registering 20 unanswered second half points to claim a bonus point win of their own.

“We weren’t unduly worried. We gave them a soft score, but in general terms we had some really good stuff in the first half,” was Hodge’s assessment, however. “Everything went to plan in terms of how they defended and attacked, but we gave them a soft score defensively and in attack obviously an interception. We felt the score maybe shouldn’t have been as it was and then in the second half we played much better. There were definitely some areas to tighten up from the first half and we kind of sorted that out.”