VANDALS have left a junior rugby club with a £7,000 bill and a race against time to replace equipment to start the new season in September.

Fire-raisers torched a container holding all Hamble Rugby Football Club's training and playing equipment, leaving a molten mess behind.

The club, based next to Hamble Community School in Satchell Lane, has just completed a traumatic season where it lost every one of 18 league fixtures in Hampshire Division One. Now, it has lost everything in the blaze.

Posts, protective pads, flags, training drill tops and playing kit were all destroyed as well as the generator which powers recently installed floodlights.

The club says it is not the first time it has been targeted and even security measures installed by the school have not deterred vandals, who have decimated the junior club which is in the throes of rebuilding itself after a difficult season.

"Everything has been written off," said club fixture secretary and Hamble school governor Gary Camfield.

"Over the last three or four months there has been a general increase in vandalism to our container. But even the increased security did not help and now everything has gone and left us in a very difficult position, as we are only a very small club who can ill afford this."

The school, which has recently been awarded specialist sports college status and has installed current Hampshire senior XV coach Roy Gittens as its first director of sport, is keen to introduce the game within the school and was looking to Hamble to help.

"As a governor at the school, I know that the school is being very good about it and, with it having a very good pitch right alongside, it has the ideal situation. But we, and they, have to make the best of a bad situation," said Mr Camfield.

Club captain George Winch, currently away on business in Stockholm, was angered by the news. He said: "We had only just installed the floodlights. It is not as if there was anything in the container which is of any use to anyone but the rugby club."

He labelled the incident as "a crass piece of mindless vandalism."

Police confirmed the incident had been reported and was being treated as arson.