Adam Jones has set the 2013 Lions tour as one of four remaining career goals.
The Wales prop won two Test caps when Britain and Ireland’s elite travelled to South Africa three years ago and now he is hoping to add to that tally in Australia next summer.
The 31-year-old has no intentions of calling time on his stellar career in the near future but when he does walk away from the sport he hopes to have added a second Lions adventure, a century of Welsh caps, a fourth World Cup and a first Heineken Cup crown with the Ospreys to his significant list of achievements.
“I would like to make the Lions tour of Australia next year,” Jones, who has played 83 times for his country, told the Wales on Sunday.
“I also want to get to 100 Wales caps and for (daughter) Isla to be old enough to come on the pitch and share the moment.
“If ‘Gats’ (Wales coach Warren Gatland) wants me, I would like to play in a fourth World Cup.
“The Ospreys should have beaten Biarritz in San Sebastian to reach the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup two years ago but we didn’t take our chances. And against Saracens two years before that in the quarter-finals, I think we were too complacent. We had hammered them a couple of weeks before and had chances against them in the Heineken but we spurned them.”
Jones didn’t spurn his own chance with the Lions back in ’09, though, after he replaced Phil Vickery with the tourists’ scrum in all sorts of trouble in Durban.
The former Neath tighthead returned from his first Lions adventure in the Republic with his reputation greatly enhanced and criticisms for a perceived lack of stamina finally put to bed.
Jones was a revelation alongside fellow Welshmen Matthew Rees and Gethin Jenkins and many feel the Lions lost the series when two of the three front-row stars succumbed to injury midway through the 28-25 defeat at Loftus Versfeld.
A dislocated shoulder in Pretoria ruled Jones out of the victorious third Test in Johannesburg, leaving him keen to do it all again Down Under.
