Despite a stellar domestic career, Paras Dogra is likely to end up without playing for India: he is not the only one from the modern era.
Jammu & Kashmir were 13-2 when captain Dogra stepped out to bat against Bengal in the semi-final of the 2025/26 Ranji Trophy. They soon became 13-3, but Dogra (58) and Abdul Samad (82) took them to 198-5 at stumps on the second day.
En route, Dogra became the second batter to score 10,000 runs in the Ranji Trophy: Wasim Jaffer (12,038) is the only other person to have done this. Among those who payed in the 2025/26 edition, Maharashtra’s Ankit Bawne (7,316) is Dogra’s nearest competitor.
Thanks to runs in the Duleep Trophy and the Irani Cup (and in a game for India A), Dogra’s first-class aggregate now stands at 10,508 runs. Now 41, he belongs to the Alan Jones clan of domestic giants – batters with a lot of first-class runs but without an international cap.
Jones holds a special place on this list for two reasons. One, his 36,049 first-class runs are the most for an uncapped cricketer. And two, he was given a Test cap (for the Rest of the World against England in 1970) that was taken away (when the matches were stripped of Test status). In 2020, the ECB gave him a Test cap (#696), but he remains uncapped for all statistical purposes.
For this list, we shall not include Jones – or, for that matter, anyone whose domestic career (across formats) ended in the 20th century. Even then, it is a long list, from which we have selected ten.
All numbers until February 16, 2026.
1. Paul Johnson (main team: Nottinghamshire)
20,534 runs at 36.40, 40 hundreds
Johnson’s dream of playing for Notts came true at only 17. By the time he retired, two decades later in 2002, he had earned a reputation of aggressive batting (in 1993, he won the Walter Lawrence Trophy for scoring the fastest hundred of the summer), and had led the historic county. It was surprising that he was not considered even for the ODIs, especially given his blitzes as an opener in domestic cricket. The lost man of the “lost” generation, The Wisden Cricketer called him in 2005.
2. Darren Bicknell (main teams: Surrey, Nottinghamshire)
19,931 runs at 38.55, 46 hundreds
The older brother of Test cricketer Martin, Darren Bicknell won the Walter Lawrence Trophy as well, in 1989. Between 1989 and 1994, he hit the 1,000-run mark in six consecutive summers, and followed them with 997 runs in 1995 and 969 in 1996, but there was no Test cap – or even an ODI cap, despite the 1990s being one of England’s more ordinary decades.
3. Peter Bowler (main teams: Derbyshire, Somerset)
19,567 runs at 40.51, 45 hundreds
Despite his name, Bowler was a specialist bat – and a particularly slow one (though he made nearly 10,000 List A runs as well); so slow that, in his own words, “the stands emptied and bars and restaurants were filled to capacity”. Born in Devon but raised in Canberra, Bowler made it to the Australian Under-19s side in 1982 before carving out a long, fruitful career for two counties, but could not get the Test cap.
4. Amol Muzumdar (main team: Bombay/Mumbai)
11,167 runs at 48.13, 30 hundreds
Muzumdar went to the same school and had the same coach as Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli, and announced himself to professional cricket with 260 on first-class debut in 1993/94, a world record that stayed for nearly a quarter of a century. Despite scoring runs by the thousands until 2013/14, he could not break into a Test XI with vacancies at the top but none in the middle order. Unlike them, however, he coached an Indian team to a World Cup title.
5. Jamie Cox (main teams: Tasmania, Somerset)
18,614 runs at 42.69, 51 hundreds
A legend of the Sheffield Shield, Cox has the most games (161) and second-most runs (10,821) in the history of the tournament, where he forged a famous opening partnership with Dene Hills. Unfortunately, he played at a time when one had to compete with Mark Taylor, Michael Slater, Matthew Hayden, and Justin Langer in order to open batting for Australia. Instead, he chose to plunder runs (and lead) in domestic cricket in both Australia and England. After his retirement in 2006, Cox became a national selector.
6. James Hildreth (main team: Somerset)
18,000 runs at 41.00, 47 hundreds
Part of the England Under-15s and Under-19s setup, Hildredth was noticed after hitting a triple hundred in 2004. During the 2005 Ashes, he caught Ricky Ponting as a substitute in the Lord’s Test of 2005, but that was unfortunately the closest he came to Test cricket. He played for Somerset from 2003 to 2022, peaking in 2015 with 1,620 runs at 55.86, and retired with the highest multiple of thousand runs among all first-class cricketers, surpassing Aravinda de Silva’s 15,000.
7. Darren Stevens (main team: Kent)
16,676 runs at 35.18, 38 hundreds
591 wickets at 24.78, 31 five-fors
Long before he became a cult hero of Kent (and England and, generally, aficionados of domestic cricket around the world), Stevens had made it to the 30-member longlist for England’s 2003 World Cup squad. Two years later, he moved from Leicestershire to Kent, and continued to play there well past his 46th birthday, supplementing his batting with medium-pace bowling. He was named Kent’s Player of the Year six times, including a hat-trick after he turned 43. In 2021, he became Wisden’s oldest Cricketer of the Year in 88 years.
8. Dominic Hendricks (main teams: Gauteng, Lions)
10,023 runs at 37.68, 19 hundreds
Hendricks, a left-handed opener, seemed headed for big things when he finished as the leading run-scorer at the 2010 U19 World Cup (his 391 runs came at 97.95), well clear of the next three – Kraigg Brathwaite, Babar Azam, and Bhanuka Rajapaksa. Now 35, he is active in first-class cricket and still has an outside chance of making a Test debut, but two “Tests” for South Africa A in 2021 were all that came his way.
9. Sam Northeast (main teams: Kent, Hampshire, Glamorgan)
14,561 runs at 40.11, 35 hundreds
Unless something unusual happens, Northeast is going to finish as the second cricketer (after BB Nimbalkar) with a first-class quadruple hundred but without a Test cap. A multi-sport athlete in his early days, Northeast was marked out as a leadership candidate at Kent, for whom he had a long career. He also had stints with Hampshire and Glamorgan, for whom he got his famous unbeaten 410 in 2022 and 335 not out (the highest first-class score at Lord’s) in 2024.
10. Paras Dogra (main teams: Himachal Pradesh, Puducherry, Jammu & Kashmir)
10,508 runs at 48.20, 34 hundreds
The inspiration behind this list, Dogra made his debut in an era when the first round of the Ranji Trophy was played in zonal format. Over the years, he has been a behemoth for three teams – none of which are a Ranji heavyweight. He did play an unofficial “Test” for India A in 2013, but that was the closest he got to a Test cap. Jaffer’s tournament record does not seem impossible to emulate...
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