Cricket veterans' 300 not out

IT has been a great few weeks for the statisticians as several Larne cricketers have achieved significant landmarks for the club.

Saturday’s final league match of the season – a victory over Templepatrick at Sandy Bay – marked 300 appearances for both Trevor Dempsey and Wylie McKinty - the first players to reach this mark for the club.

Trevor has been wicket keeper and middle-order batsman since the mid-1990s and is still going strong. His catches and stumpings, standing up to the wicket for the medium-pace bowlers, has been the trademark of his keeping, while he has scored almost 4,000 runs and has seen his team home with the bat on countless occasions.

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Wylie batted No 3 for the team through the late-1980s and 1990s and remains the Larne’s highest scorer with 5,506 runs. Although umpiring more than playing now, Wylie richly deserved the opportunity to achieve this milestone.

The same match was also a significant day for current skipper Gareth Gaw, who took his 200th wicket for the team and also passed 1,000 runs with his first half-century.

Gareth has been a regular for the last eight years and has been bowling his left-arm spin with great effect since then. He bowls with great accuracy and control and regularly gets 30 wickets a season, with a good economy rate.

Gareth is only the fifth player to take over 200 wickets for the team and is sure to go on to take many more. His batting has been improving every year, with this season being by far his best, as and this was shown with a match-winning 50-not-out to take his team home on Saturday.

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The penultimate game of the season at Cregagh was a special one for Paul Ramsay, as he became the first player in the club to take 400 wickets. Paul has been bowling his seamers for the best part of 20 years and his control and accuracy is second to none.

He has sent down over 13,000 deliveries down the years and it is no exaggeration to say that there has barely been a bad one among them. His economy rate remains below 2.50 and so long as he remains supremely fit and enthusiastic it would be no surprise to see Paul go on to reach 500 over the next few seasons.

The week before that, at Millpark, Gareth Alexander had become just the second player to pass 5,000 runs for Larne. Gareth has been opening the batsman for the last 12 seasons and has been scoring runs consistently during that time.

His first 50 of this season saw him pass the record of 24 half-centuries and he went on to add five more to now stand on 30 fifties to add to his two centuries.

This has been another strong year, with almost 600 runs scored, and Gareth will be looking to score many more runs over the coming seasons.

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