Non-league side Ashington AFC are currently having a mare in a very literal sense after finding several of their recent home games gate-crashed by a horse.

According to the Metro, no-one at the club quite knows who the nag belongs to, but it routinely makes its way down to their Portland Park home ground to watch the team in action by exploiting a gap in the fence around its field .

Having reportedly been spotted at a couple of previous games, the horse attended last weekend’s outing against Crook Town, and boy did he pick the right game to watch - as Ashington went on to rack up a thoroughly entertaining 7-3 victory.

Martin Bamforth, the fan responsible for taking the photo above, told local press that the horse was ‘the oddest thing he’d ever seen’, before adding that the official match attendance was announced during the latter stages of the game as “597 – plus a horse!”.