Vandals leave their mark on junior pitch

Horrified officials of Alnwick Town FC Juniors couldn’t believe their eyes on Saturday morning when they discovered deep tyre marks in the turf at Greensfield.

A club statement on Facebook said that it appeared that the culprits had driven over the grass twice and fixing the damage during the winter was ‘near impossible’. The incident is believed to have happened overnight on Friday.

The statement read: ‘We didn’t expect to find tyre marks dug deep into our 9v9 pitch. Mindless vandalism really doesn’t make sense. Our volunteers put long, hard hours into the area we have only for their work to be ruined by a small minority. The pitch is shared by our U11 Magpies and U14 Girls, who don’t deserve to suffer because of some idiot’s lunacy.’

Alnwick Town Juniors chairman Peter Hately said it was frustrating, but the club won’t allow ‘worthless fools to distress us for too long’.

He said that the club’s excellent volunteers will fix the damage, but admitted that, in the mean time, a new pitch might have to be marked out. Alnwick Castle Golf Club has offered to donate turf to help with the repairs.

The vandalism prompted a string of critical comments on the club’s Facebook page. Among them, Paul Davidson wrote: ‘I’ve probably spent 40-hours-plus trying to make that pitch playable for the kids this season along with a couple of other volunteers. I would really like to know who did this!’

The Greensfield facility has multiple pitches and is used by various Alnwick teams and the town’s high-school pupils.