Alan Jones

Alan Jones MBE (born 4 November 1938) is a Welsh cricketer, who played for Glamorgan for almost a quarter of a century. He also played, for a single season each, with Western Australia, Natal and Northern Transvaal. He holds the record for scoring the most runs in first-class cricket without playing in an official Test match.

Career Jones was a consistent, compact left-handed opening batsman who scored 1,000 first-class runs in every English cricket season from 1961 to 1983, when he retired. In five out of six seasons from 1963 to 1968 he scored more than 1,800 runs, and averaged in the mid-30s for most seasons. His consistency and reliability were the foundation for the Championship-winning Glamorgan side of 1969, but were just as important in the much less successful sides of the 1970s.

A product of local cricket near Swansea, Jones played first for Glamorgan in 1957. After two years of National Service, he was a regular in the county side in 1960 and made 1,000 runs for the first time in 1961, winning his cap in 1962. Thereafter he was a fixture in the side until he retired at the end of the 1983 season, and his record of scoring 1,000 runs in 23 seasons has been beaten by only 10 other cricketers. His total career aggregate of 36,049 first-class runs put him 35th on the all-time list of run-getters and is the highest of any player who did not play Test cricket. He was picked, along with fellow opening batsman Brian Luckhurst, to début in the first match between England and the Rest of the World XI in 1970 after the cancellation of the South African cricket team's tour. He scored five and nought, dismissed by Mike Procter in both innings, and was not picked again. The match, originally given Test status, was later ruled not to count as a Test match. with the ECB awarding him cap number 696, fifty years after the match.