By cricketing, your Worship: four desperate words to encapsulate the precariousness of the professional cricket life, f

SAINT-DENIS, France -- This time, Cristiano Ronaldo cried with joy at a European Championship final and lifted the trophy as the winning captain.The Portugal star hoisted the silver trophy and screamed Vamos -- Lets go -- as he got his hands on an elusive first major title for his national team at the age of 31.First there had been anguish. Ronaldo had a tearful night as first he was injured by a strong tackle by Frances Dimitri Payet, forcing him to leave the pitch in the 25th minute of the game when he was unable to continue.He returned to the field to rally his teammates for 30 minutes of extra time when it was 0-0 after 90 minutes at the Stade de France.Defying the pain of a heavily bandaged left knee, Ronaldo took the role of assistant to coach Fernando Santos and leaped around the technical area urging on his players.When substitute forward Eder fired a fired low shot to score in the 109th minute, Ronaldo cried again and held his hands up in a prayer gesture as he walked away for a moment alone before joining the jumping huddle of celebrating Portugal players and staff.A full 12 years after a teenaged Ronaldo cried on the field in Lisbon after the Euro 2004 host Portuguese team lost 1-0 to Greece, his emotions were on show again on the big stage.This time, he left his teammates to pull off a similar upset against a favored host nation, France, on Sunday. And they did.The Portugal players quickly recovered their composure after losing their talisman midway through the first half.Ronaldo exited the pitch on a stretcher with his hands covering his face to hide the tears beneath.For the three-time world player of the year, he must have thought Euro 2016 was his best -- or even only -- chance of a title with Portugal.Ronaldo was perhaps the victim of his own over-confidence and nonchalance as Payet charged in to challenge.Standing still with his right foot hovering over the ball in midfield, Ronaldo struck a teasing pose as if to taunt Payet about what he planned to do next.When Ronaldo finally passed the ball away, his weight was on his standing left leg that took the force of the Frenchmans tackle. Payets right knee bumped hard into Ronaldos left knee, and the pain was immediately obvious.Ronaldo tried to run off the injury, but repeatedly reached down with his right and left hands to gently press his knee.The Portugal team doctors treated him once on the sidelines, then bandaged the knee to give greater support.Still, Ronaldo never looked comfortable and with 23 minutes on the clock, he raised an arm to signal to Portugal coach Fernando Santos that he could not continue.Boos rained down on Payet from fans at Portugals end of the stadium when he was substituted early in the second half.After the 90 minutes ended at 0-0, Ronaldo emerged from the players tunnel to rally his teammates.Looking tense and emotional, Ronaldo went between players with hugs and words of encouragement before taking a seat in the dugout to watch the rest of the final.At half time in extra time, he urged tactical advice on long-time friend Nani and hugged the relatively inexperienced Eder.As the seconds ticked away at the end of the match, Ronaldo hugged and shoved Santos in a show of exuberant happiness. 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Scott Kazmir allowed four hits in seven shutout innings, Michael Brantley hit a two-run homer in a three-run first inning and the Indians maintained their hold on an AL wild-card spot with a 4-1 win over the Houston Astros on Saturday night.Charles Bannerman is known today by a feat and an image. The feat, of course, is that of having faced Test crickets first ball and scored its first run and peeling off its maiden century, a match-winning 165 from an Australian all-out score of 245 at the MCG in March 1877. The image is a widely published photograph taken nearly 53 years later of an elderly Bannerman, in hat and coat, laying a gently approving hand on the shoulder of Donald Bradman at the SCG, when the 21-year-old was about to commence his near-vertical ascent through crickets hierarchy of records.The time lapse between feat and image is perhaps just as evocative. Bannermans cricket peak was brief and lonely: you can almost argue that it was confined to that innings, when he took toll of an English bowling attack still queasy from a stormy crossing of the Tasman, for it was almost exactly twice his next best first-class score, and he played only two further Test matches. But a record is one thing, a first another. A record can be broken; a first can never be busted to second. Bannermans feat afforded him such imperishable status that he could, as it were, induct Bradman in an Australian batting lineage, with the additional prophecy: This boy will clip all the records.The big gap is also an enigma, both enticing and off-putting to a potential biographer. Bannerman has probably waited as long as any cricketer for a historian to go searching for him, and Alf James, a studious classicist, reveals the pressure of the years in Australias Premier Batsman.The traces are scant, limited and ambiguous. There are no photographs of Bannerman in action. The written accounts of his batting are disappointingly short of detail. James deems him a pioneer of forward play, but a mental image of his batting is hard to summon. Likewise a personal image. When James quotes a fond 1923 memoir of Bannerman from the journalist Jack Worrall - May he long remain with us, with his big blue eyes and his lisp - the intimacy of the observation is powerful because it is so exceptional. Otherwise James has been left to recite a lot of scores, including some lengthy threadbare sequences, which seem a little redundant seeing that they are recapitulated in statistical appendices.Yet there is something here, and if the writing is mainly serviceable, with the occasional Latinate flourish, an intriguing story is at least hinted at.Born in Woolwich, Bannerman was two years old when his family arrived in Sydney, his mother heavily pregnant with his brother Alick, himself destined to play 28 Tests. Their father worked at Sydneys mint, whose deputy master was an accomplished round-arm bowler. The boys walked in, then, on an evolving game.It was also the unruly game of an unruly people, and Charles Bannerman was no exception. James reveals that 19-year-old Bannerman lost his own mint job for insolence to his superior officer and general insubordination, and went through a period in his early twenties when he alienated many contemporaries by his cocky club- and colony-hopping. The colt was considered a bright particular star while he lasted, said a censorious columnist in the Sydney Mail in March 1874, but a good many people have come to the conclusion that for some time he has been on the wane, and that if common sense does not come to his aid he will be snuffed out forever.David Warner, then, has a distinguished anntecedent.dddddddddddd Although not even Warner had three children with his first wife and two children with a mistress ten years his junior.Bannermans crowded hour of glorious batting life came when he was 25. After the subsequent Australian tour of England, he dropped away precipitously, in a way strangely foretold. And although James has been unable to establish any satisfactory explanation, writers seemed uncannily aware that the process was irreversible. By 1879, the Sydney Morning Herald was calling him only the ghost of himself, Australian Town and Country Journal only the ghost of the player we used to know, and the Sydney Mail was asserting that there was no prospect of improvement.Whatever they meant, they were right. For the next five years, Bannerman averaged less than 15 in first-class cricket. Drink and gambling, it is reputed, was his downfall, wrote a contemporary many years later, although James shies from this far-fetched conclusion on the slight evidence available. James being a reluctant interpreter, the reader is left in a way to build their own story. My own was this. Bannerman was unusual in his Australian era in playing openly as a professional. After losing his mint job, he seems to have had only fragmentary employment outside the game. Instead he relied on playing, touring, coaching and umpiring. His only other fallback, bookmaking, was a constraint. Not only did it eat into his Saturdays, but the England team of 1882-83 refused to accept him as an umpire - not surprising, really, given the betting-related cricket riot at the SCG four years earlier.Bannerman was a professional, in other words, long before there was anything like a professional cricket structure. And for it he, and others, paid a price. Probably the most moving passages in James book are from a news story in Sydneys Evening News, May 27, 1891, headlined A Cricketer in Low Circumstances: Bannerman had been arraigned to answer charges of desertion of his wife, and failure to provide for her. An exchange is recorded:Judge: Your family is in destitute circumstances. How do you get your living? Bannerman: By cricketing, your Worship. Judge: But its the off season now, and theres not much doing in that line. Bannerman: Ive nothing to say against my wife, your worship, at all. If you will give me a week to try and get the money, I might get some of it. By cricketing, your Worship: four desperate words to encapsulate the precariousness of the professional cricket life, for the player and for their financial dependents. Blessedly it was not to be the end. Cricket biography reserves a special place for the tragic figure. Bannerman ends up being a rarer figure in biography - a subject who flirted with tragedy and survived. When his wife died in 1895, he was able to marry his mistress, and he benefited by testimonial matches in 1899 and 1922; his prudent brother, meanwhile, grew wealthy.In that 1930 photograph with bashful Bradman, Bannerman strikes a pose of solemn dignity befitting the prestige of his achievement - with maybe just a hint of the character he had been in his playing days. For is that a cigarette in his hand?Charles Bannerman: Australias Premier Batsman By Alf James The Cricket Publishing Company 146pages, $41.80 ' ' '