Deer Orchard, Cockermouth’s Sunday League club celebrating 60 years of consecutive football activity this season, has suffered a vandal attack.
Teenagers ran riot on the Wakefield Road ground on Saturday afternoon and smashed the club’s changing rooms and store. The away section of the converted portacabin will have to be replaced.
Orchard’s home game with Sun Inn was postponed and the club, inundated with offers of help, is looking for a replacement portacabin.
Secretary Gary Horsley said: “It’s terrible and the lads were in no state of mind to play after that.
“I got a phone call to say that lots of youngsters were running around on the pitch, some with scaffolding poles and were smashing the doors, windows and sides of the changing rooms.
“Subsequently the police have been given a number of names of teenagers who were recognised. They had even put videos of the vandalism being committed on social media.
“There was a fair going on at the car park adjacent to the ground and I think that’s why there were so many kids there.
“The Workington Sunday League have offered to help and we have had a lot of offers of help from townspeople, businesses and former players.
“We are on the look-out now for a replacement portacabin which perhaps is not being used any more by a local firm.”
Deer Orchard was formed in 1962/63 by a group of football mad youngsters at rugby-playing Cockermouth Grammar School and after initially playing in the Junior Derwent Valley League for Under-18’s moved into the Workington Sunday League.
They are the longest-serving Sunday League side in the county, and probably in the country with unbroken 60 years service.
