Newbridge club vows to fight to make grounds safe after vandals destroy their pitches

Newbridge Hotspurs FC secretary, Robert Dunne has vowed to continue the struggle to see their playing grounds in Rickardstown properly secured after vandals, this week, wreaked havoc on their two pitches with a stolen teleporter.

The hoodlums involved, crashed the machine through the wooden fence surrounding the club’s playing area before proceeding to churn up the surface as they careened recklessly around both pitches.

The vandals then reportedly drove the teleporter up into the neighbouring Rosconnell estate, damaging the railings surrounding a local playground before abandoning the machine after crashing it into an ESB pole.

It is the latest episode in a long-list of anti-social behaviour that has bedeviled Kildare’s oldest soccer club and undermined efforts to see it grow and flourish in recent years, but Dunne is hopeful this appalling incident will rekindle efforts to have the club’s pitches walled in and protected.

“We had a proposal to construct a brick wall with a railing on it to help secure the ground properly” explained Dunne.

“There were plans drawn up, so we’re hoping that, with this latest incident that’s after happening now, that it might actually get a push on it.

“The wall and the railing is a massive job and we understand that. It’s €100k just to get the front of it done and we need to get the whole ground secured. We’ve been campaigning for a long time to do that.

“Unfortunately, because we have so few members, fundraising is hard, sponsorship is hard, so we are hoping the Council might help us out,” he told The Kildare Nationalist.

This latest act of mindless vandalism is one of many incidents that Newbridge Hotspurs have had to deal over the past number of years, but Dunne is adamant that he and the other club members will not be giving up the fight to make their grounds safe.

“Our dressing rooms were broken into two years ago and they robbed two sets of football kits and a lot of training gear and they just set it on fire in the carpark,” he recalled.

“There was close-on €2000 worth of damage done that time, and, for a small club like ours, that’s a lot of money.

“During the dark nights, we had floodlights up and they were vandalized. All the wiring was cut, so we’ve had to train on astro pitches, meaning, any money that we did get in had to go to another club to use their astro pitches to train.

“Every week there’s a fire over at the pitch. I’ve gone up and I’ve had to put out a fire right in the center circle of the pitch.

“It’s infuriating. The amount of man hours that I personally put into the pitch every week to get it ready for games and then something like this happens, but we’re not giving up, we’re not giving in to them,” he insisted.

Dunne believes that bordering off and protecting their grounds will be a major step towards seeing the return of underage soccer to Newbridge Hotspurs.

Today the club caters for two senior teams who compete in the Senior Division and Division Two ranks of the KDFL.

While their second team made it as far as this season’s Division Two Cup Final, losing out to Straffan, the Newbridge firsts have secured their berth in this month’s Senior/Premier Shield Final.

Indeed, Newbridge have more than held their own at senior level, and, while Dunne believes the re-establishment of an underage section is key to future growth and development of the club, that can only be accomplished once the safety of young players is assured.

“I joined the club about 12 years ago and at that stage we had six underage teams, but now we have none,” sighed Dunne.

“We used to have a good set-up for underage, but then between the lack of volunteers and the way the grounds were being run, we decided not to have any more underage teams until we can get the grounds secured.

“There was drug dealing taking place in the carpark while they were training and so we decided that, until we can get this ground secure, we can’t have kids over here.

“If the grounds are secure, we get more members, if we get more members, we get more funding and more sponsorship, and then we can grow,” he explained.

Access to funding has been made all the more difficult for Hotspurs given both the sheer number of local clubs in demand for it and their relatively small size among those groups scrambling for a place at the trough.

With just 45 playing members right now, Hotspurs have found themselves some way down the food chain when it comes to securing financial support.

That can only be addressed by the influx of new members, which in itself hinges largely on the provision of secure playing facilities, something the club is working towards with local councillors.

“We tried to fundraise, we tried to get sponsorship, but the problem is that there’s only so much money in the kitty and there’s so many clubs now in Newbridge,” said Dunne.

“There’s four soccer clubs, two GAA clubs, a rugby club, amongst others, and they’re all pulling out of the same kitty. And because we don’t have underage or female teams, we’re pushed to the back. We’re way down the pecking order.

“That’s why the wall and the railing around our pitch is so important. It’s all part of the development of that area to secure our grounds, put speed ramps up and parking bollards outside the school [Scoil Na Naomh Uilig], which will help secure the whole lot.

“Cllr. Chris Pender was up yesterday and did a full tour and he’s going to get on to the Council on our behalf, as will Cllr. Peggy O’Dwyer.

“I’m going to talk to whomever I need to talk to and I’ll talk to as many people as possible. The more this is highlighted the better, and it will be better for the whole community” he stressed.