Two northern Victorian cricket stalwarts have been inducted into the Victorian Country Cricket League Hall of Fame.
Rushworth sporting legend Peter ‘Rags’ Raglus and Bamawm’s Graham Turner were presented with the honour at a ceremony at St Kilda’s Junction Oval last week.
Raised in Ballarat, Turner played Melbourne Country Week as a 15-year-old with the Ballarat Cricket Association in 1966.
He was a member of Ballarat’s Melbourne Country Week premiership run in the top tier of competition between from 1978 to 1980.
A move to Bamawm in his profession as a schoolteacher — he taught at Rochester Primary School — proved a massive gain for the Bamawm Lockington Cricket Club, then competing in the Rochester and District Cricket Association.
He represented the Rochester association in the 1980s and Campaspe association in the 1990s, right up to 2002 when he was 50 years old.
His bowling skills won him selection in Victorian Country representative teams, which played the West Indies in Benalla in 1984 and Echuca in 1985, and Sri Lanka in Shepparton in 1986.
An opening left-arm quick, he produced many stunning bowling performances and feats during his career, which included more than 20 hat-tricks.
Turner is a life member of Bamawm Lockington United Cricket Club, the Campaspe Cricket Association and the Northern Rivers Cricket Region.
As well as coaching regional under-18 and -21 teams for 20 years, Turner coached the Victorian Country representative teams between 2000 and 2003 after playing in the first Australian Country Championships in 1985.
He has been a Victorian Country Cricket League board member for 17 years.
• Peter Raglus, affectionately known as ‘Rags’, received the reward for his support of the annual Melbourne Country Week cricket carnival.
The honour adds to his long list of accolades, which include life memberships of the Goulburn Murray Cricket competition and former Kyabram District Cricket Association as well as the Rushworth cricket and football clubs.
Rags transported the former KDCA representative teams and in recent times the Goulburn Murray sides to the annual Melbourne Country Week cricket carnival for 37 years.
In the first 15 years of these trips he was a playing allrounder with the KDCA side and took a memorable 8/50 in a final in which Kyabram was defeated by Albury.
The now 66-year-old said he would still love to be driving the bus to Melbourne, but since the merger of the Kyabram and Campaspe cricket associations to form the GM Cricket competition, representative sides were no longer being sent to the century-old carnival.
Despite being in the veterans’ age group, Rags still loves playing the game and will line up again this season with Rushworth in GM Cricket’s D grade competition, which has been named in his honour for his service to the KDCA and GM Cricket associations.