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 antecedent. 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 Custom Hockey Jerseys . Giroud, who wasnt in the starting lineup for two matches after allegations about his private life and a decline in form, scored twice in the first half. Tomas Rosickys chip made it 3-0 before half time at Emirates Stadium, while defender Laurent Koscielny scored an unmarked header in the second half. Cheap Hockey Jerseys China .J. -- New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz will miss the rest of the season after having surgery on his left knee. https://www.fakehockeyjerseys.com/ . They were putting most of their energy into a record-setting offensive display. Authentic Hockey Jerseys . Tests earlier this week revealed a Grade 2 left hamstring strain for Sabathia, who was hurt in last Fridays start against San Francisco. Its an injury that will require about eight weeks to heal. He finished a disappointing campaign just 14-13 with a career-worst 4. Cheap Hockey Jerseys . With the short-handed Warriors needing help from someone -- anyone -- to stop a three-game skid, ONeal returned from right knee and groin injuries that had sidelined him for four games and put up season highs with 18 points and eight rebounds. It was just enough to help lift Golden State to a 102-101 victory over the New Orleans Pelicans on Tuesday night. After last years unsatisfying fare, day one at the WACA was the cricket equivalent of a big juicy steak - or for vegans, an especially succulent mushroom. The ball flew off Matthew Pages pitch with bounce and pace, batsmen were startled onto the back foot where often they press forward, and a healthy crowd of 12,382 oohd and ahhd in obvious enjoyment.Australia, in search of a win to set the tone for the summer, were delighted by the carry for Mitchell Starc in the very first over of the morning. Peter Nevill was taking the ball up around shoulder height, and Stephen Cook fell off the fourth ball when he was unable to ride the bounce, like so many visiting batsmen of yore.Mitchell Marsh flew through the air at gully for the catch, and in an instant, numerous years of beige cricket on this ground were cancelled out. Memories harked instantly back to Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, Malcolm Marshall and Curtly Ambrose. Had he seen bounce like that last year, Mitchell Johnson might still be playing now.It was all a reminder of how much the pitch is as much a character in the drama of Test cricket as the cricketers themselves, dictating the style of play, the interest of spectators and the urgency of the players. The match was being played at a pace the Australians love, redolent of southern summers under blue skies and raucous crowds.For a while, the hosts were dictating play to a domineering extent, scything through South Africas top order with an eye on batting not too long after lunch. An overpowering first-up performance with the ball has often been the cornerstone of Australian success, setting up the scoreboard and also opening up mental scars to be exploited later, even if subsequent pitches are not as slippery as Perth or, more often, Brisbane.The pre-lunch run of wickets was not sustained, as Temba Bavuma and Quinton de Kock led a fine rearguard, not dissimilar to that performed by Faf du Plessis from another ordinary South African start on this ground in 2012. This is something else about Australian-style cricket with which the hosts are well familiar. As hard as it can be to start against the new ball, the Kookaburra eases up as a projectile after an hour or two, while the evenness of pace and bounce allows batsmen - or bowlers with bat in hand - to get into a rhythm.The captain Steven Smith had noted this on match eve. That is one thing we have done well in Australia over the last couple of years, everyones contributed with the bat, he said. Ideally you want the batters to score some runs at the top of the order and in the middle order but when they havvent, the guys at six, seven, eight, nine and ten have all contributed and been able to get us a big total.dddddddddddd You want everyone working on their batting and hopefully getting us as big a total as possible. Knowledge of this scenario is important, as ring fields and steadier bowling replace the more hyper-aggressive stuff seen early on. Well though de Kock and Bavuma played, Smiths men knew that the opportunity had been opened to prevent a major first innings. Thanks to Starc, Hazlewood, Peter Siddle and Nathan Lyon, South Africas 242 left the visitors little margin for error with the ball.That opened things up for David Warner, who remains very much a batting pugilist no matter how beatific his mien appears to be away from the crease. He and Dale Steyn had traded prognostications in the lead-up to day one, the South Africans assertion about how the snake can die if you cut off the head answered by Warners hope that South Africa would get too excited by bounce and send down a series of spectacular but useless short balls. It was the second prediction the proved more correct.Warner has flayed plenty of visiting attacks in these parts, most notably India in January 2012 and New Zealand last summer, albeit on a far less hell-for-leather kind of pitch. This time around, he prospered from thick edges as much as deliveries striking the middle, at one point seeming to indicate to Steyn that he did not mean to send an upper-cut flying over the slips cordon.But the pace on the ball ensured that Warner would get value for shots snicked as well as struck, and a later upper-cut was more deliberate, resulting in a ball that cleared the boundary rope even as Warner was left, quite literally, on the seat of his pants. Pressure, relieved slightly on South Africa by their lower order flourish, was quickly transferred back as runs flowed at comfortably better than five per over. Vernon Philanders no-ball on a very adjacent LBW appeal grew increasingly costly with each passing minute.There is still plenty of cricket to be played in this match - the surface will likely quicken further on the second morning, offering the possibility of quick wickets to open up an Australian middle order lacking anyone of de Kocks class. Even so, Smiths Australians packed up for the evening confident in the knowledge that away defeats have not dulled their innate sense of how to play at home, particularly on red-blooded days like these. Compliments to the chef. ' ' '