Members of the Otago cricket community are mourning former long-serving player and administrator Ian Rutherford.<\/p>\n
He died after his vehicle went off Moa Flat Rd\u00a0and down a bank near Ettrick on Thursday morning.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rutherford was 68.<\/p>\n
The father of three had long been considered one of the unluckiest Otago cricketers not to earn national selection.<\/p>\n
Rutherford, an opening batter, was a stalwart of the Otago team from 1974-75 to 1983-84, during which time he also played one season for Central Districts and had a year with Worcestershire in English county cricket.<\/p>\n
He played 79 first-class games, scoring 3794 runs at an average of 27.10 with five centuries and 16 half-centuries, and 21 list A games, scoring 449 runs with one century.<\/p>\n
He captained Otago in six first-class games.<\/p>\n
Rutherford\u2019s high score was a remarkable 222 \u2014 scored over 10 hours \u2014 to help Otago to a first-innings win over Central in the 1978-79 Shell Trophy final in New Plymouth.<\/p>\n
That success helped ease the frustration of missing New Zealand selection for the tour in 1978 when many felt he should have been on the plane.<\/p>\n
Rutherford \u2014 like brother Ken and nephew Hamish, both of whom played for New Zealand \u2014 was a member of the Albion club in Dunedin before he moved to Alexandra.<\/p>\n
He scored nearly 1000 runs for Central Otago in districts cricket, spent five years as chief executive of the then-Central Otago Cricket Association, and coached at club and schoolboy level.<\/p>\n
A couple of prominent former Otago cricketers lamented Rutherford\u2019s loss on social media.<\/p>\n
It was \u2018\u2018incredibly sad news\u2019\u2019, Stu McCullum posted.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018You will be sadly missed, my friend.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Evan Marshall said it was \u2018\u2018so sad\u2019\u2019 to hear Rutherford had died.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018Thoughts with his family and friends at this time. Top man.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
An obituary will follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Members of the Otago cricket community are mourning former long-serving player and administrator Ian Rutherford. He died after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-365848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}