Published: Friday, 9th January, 2009 12:30pm

New Year vandals destroy Peebles school rugby posts

HOGMANAY hooligans have dealt rugby in Peebles another devastating body blow.

In the early hours of New Year"s Day, four sets of rugby posts were vandalised at Peebles High School causing over £1,000 of damage.

This incident has also robbed the town of two playing pitches at a time when Peebles RFC has been struggling to find alternative venues due to the continued deterioration of Hay Lodge Park.

Peebles RFC"s A team and Colts have been forced to train at the High School for the past several weeks because of this. However, now another new venue must be located.

The vandalism was spotted by the head of rugby at the school, David Changleng, whose house backs on to the playing fields.

The posts were untouched when he walked his dog at 8pm on New Year"s Eve. However, the next morning at 9am, Mr Changleng noticed the damage to the goal posts.

'All four sets of posts were bent right over flat to the ground. There were no tyre tracks on the pitch so it must have taken four or five strong lads to do this,' he said.

'One set of posts were only just donated to the school by the PTA in August. This will affect over 650 boys at the school who play rugby. We were supposed to play George Watsons this weekend which may have to be cancelled (the game has been switched to Edinburgh).

'It"s just mindless vandalism and will take up to five weeks now to repair or replace.'

High School Rector, John Brown added: 'I don"t know whether this was New Year"s high jinks or what, but it"s very disappointing.

'Thankfully we don"t suffer much vandalism at the school but this will now amount to expensive and needless repairs.'

Local councillor, Catriona Bhatia said: 'This is only compounding an existing problem whereby the present facilities are not of enough number or scope for the size of the school. This act is very regrettable.'

Peebles RFC President Jim Currie said: 'We need as many pitches as we can get at present and our Seconds and Colts were training up at the. This just gives us another problem to sort out while we wait on Hay Lodge getting sorted.'