Tommy Martin: Blubbering fortysomethings - Why I almost wept for the great egomaniacal teddy bear himself

And yet, when Ronaldo did the same thing on Sunday night after Portugal won the UEFA Nations League, the eyeroll-ometer did not as much as stir. In fact, I nearly wept for the great egomaniacal teddy bear myself.

The big difference between Sunday night in Munich and last summer’s waterworks in Frankfurt was that Ronaldo had, in the meantime, turned 40. A subtle difference but it means the world. Crying over a missed penalty at 39? Pull yourself together man. Blubbing over winning a tournament at 40? Ah come here you lovely big lummox.

Joining the fortysomething club is a bit like joining the guards, in that we all dress the same and we look after our own. This is because it is the age when vulnerability strikes. The old saying is that life begins at forty, but this is of course, nonsense. Forty is the beginning of the end, the milestone upon which decline begins to gallop.

Forty is when you start to make a noise like a train braking when you get up from a chair. It is when the gristly grind of knee cartilage makes it difficult to complete manoeuvres that require quick changes in direction, like turning a shopping trolley into the off-licence section. It is when the thickening around the waist begins to feel irreversible, no matter how many spin classes or 10ks you slog through.

So, we are fiercely protective of our fellow travellers on the early stage of life’s downslope. We seek safe spaces for our ilk to gather, like the AV section in Harvey Normans, 30-year reunion tours by near-pensionable Britpop bands, or five-a-side games where entry is jealously policed. If you ever bring a sprightly 38-year-old to one of the latter, you’ll know all about it.

But back to big Ron, since February of this year officially ‘one of us’. The narrative around Ronaldo and his national team has been that Portugal would be better off without him. They say that catering for his planetary scale ego is detrimental to the rest of what is a super-talented squad.

The feeling is that the current manager, Roberto Martinez, whose only significant coaching honour prior to Sunday was winning the 2012-13 FA Cup with Wigan Athletic, lacks the standing and basic intestinal fortitude to sit the ageing maestro down and tell him he’s finished.

Most people who tuned in to watch last week’s Nations League finals were staggered to see the two men still in situ, almost a full year since Ronaldo had lumbered ineffectually for Portugal in the Euros and Martinez had watched him doing so without doing anything about it, as if the captain of the Titanic had given the order to serve dessert in the dining room upon being told there was a bloody great iceberg right ahead.

And all of us could see it, even his fortysomething brethren. Ronaldo doesn’t really do any pressing, and this makes him redundant in the modern game. Pressing, for those not up with the lingo, means running around, and if there’s one thing people in their forties don’t like it’s running around, on account of the grinding knees and thickening waists I mentioned before.

But then Ronaldo scored the winning goal for Portugal in their semi-final win over Germany and followed that up with the equaliser in the final against Spain, all after completing approximately the same running stats that I do when taking the bins out once a week.

Somehow, despite the presence of all these energetic young superstars performing acts of delicate skill at high speed – including an actual 17-year-old in the Spanish prodigy Lamine Yamal - the decisive moments in both games came from a bloke in his forties.

Now I know Ronaldo is slightly atypical of those in his new demographic, unaccustomed as most of us are to ownership of rippling abdominal muscles, or indeed ever having seen our abdominal muscles at all. And few of us have over 900 career goals in professional football, a net worth of €1.25 billion or over a billion social media followers either.

But in those moments of ruthless finishing in Munich, Ronaldo was defying the same forces that challenge all of us who are greying around the temple and sagging at the midriff. Just like Ronaldo, if you are in your forties and you are reading this, you can be pretty sure that someone is wondering if somebody younger can do your job better than you can.

According to the OECD, the lifespan of a technically skilled worker has reduced from 30 years in 1987 to two years in 2025. In other words, you used to be able to learn how to do something and then do that thing pretty much up until retirement age, whereas now with the advance of technology, you are obsolete before you’ve had your mid-morning coffee unless you are constantly retraining yourself.

I suspect Ronaldo’s attitude to pressing is like the rest of us in his age cohort when we hear about digital marketing or cloud-based solutions. Some jobs just call for the knowledge to stand still, give Marc Cucurella a nudge in the back and stick the ball in the back of the net.

This was pretty much all he did on Sunday night but was enough to bring a tear to a fortysomething eye. Although that could also be the knee pain.