AN award winning junior football club has been forced to drop almost 30 league games in two months because loose horses – and irresponsible quad bikers – have wrecked their pitches.

Officials at Bishop Auckland St Mary’s Juniors FC have found it infuriating to have to postpone so many games due to the actions of a few mindless people.

The club’s chairman Steve Coulthard said: “It is so frustrating.

“It is totally thoughtless and shows a total disregard for other people.”

The club rents its Woodhouse Lane playing fields from St John's School and Sixth Form College, A Catholic Academy for its 21 teams to train and compete on.

But over winter the pitches have been out of action time and again because of the damage caused.

The ground has been churned up by the tyre tracks of quad bikes and around nine horses have repeatedly strayed onto the land, leaving a trail of hoof marks and horse muck in their wake.

The school has made its 3G pitches available for some of the fixtures but others have had to be postponed until later in the season, when hopefully the ground has recovered.

Mr Coulthard said the backlog of games is annoying for officials at the club– which has won a number of accolades including being named junior sports club of the year at the Durham and Dales Sports Awards last month– the 350 players, their parents and opposing sides.

He said: “We’ve lost lots of games because of this now, we’ve turned to inspect the pitches the day before a game and had to call them off.

“The players are keen and willing to play but cannot simply because of the state of the pitch.

"Now we will have to just try to fit them all in later which is a real inconvenience for everyone.

“After all of the work we put in at the club and on the pitches to have to call games off because people think it is okay to use the fields with their quad bikes or because they don’t keep horses secured is a real frustration.

“We’ve got 50 or 60 volunteers who look after the teams and I’ve personally spent hours reseeding round the goalmouths and now we’re going to have to use our time to clear up muck, there is a health and safety implication too.”

As the fields are owned by St John’s RC School and Sixth Form, the damage caused had also impacted on the school’s PE lessons and sports fixtures.