Tommy Martin: How should we feel about Gareth Bale's decline?
Gareth Bale is "a great talent reduced to shuffling about for uneventful seven-minute cameos off the bench," writes Tommy Martin.
There is a story in football circles about when Gareth Bale first went to Madrid. He joined in 2013 for a then world record transfer fee of €100m, €6m more than Real had paid for Cristiano Ronaldo four years previously.
This was a delicate matter in Madrid. While the British papers reported the real fee, the Spanish press said Real had only paid €91m, lest Ronaldo be displeased at the knock to his status.
A few days after arriving, Bale found himself alone with Ronaldo in the physio room. He attempted to strike up conversation with his new team-mate. Maybe a little joke at the media circus around the transfer fee.
Ronaldo blanked him. Just continued scrolling on his phone, staring straight ahead. The message was clear: Pretenders to the throne will not be entertained.
Or so the story goes. Even if it’s not true it’s the kind of soapy tale we like to hear about the inner workings of top-level sport. Ronaldo has enough of the drama queen about him to make it believable and Bale always seemed an uneasy entrant into the Bernabeu’s perpetual rutting stag contest.
Bale was the unlikely Galactico, after all. Even at the peak of his powers, there was always an element of Billy’s Boots about the one-time Southampton left-back, suddenly to be found careering past Champions League defenders at improbable speeds, thumping rockets into the top corner.
It felt like the plot of a cheesy children’s TV programme. You expected the camera to cut to Harry Redknapp, who’d be rubbing his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, shouting “Love a duck!” The transfer to Real Madrid seemed the perfect end to the corny tale, our hero shrugging his shoulders at the madness of it all. Even as he grew into his superstar status, with chiselled torso and topknot, he would always seem a little bit like the normal boy who suddenly discovered he had superpowers.
NEXT WEEK – Gareth scores an overhead bicycle kick in the Champions League final! Gareth leads Wales - WALES! – to the semi-finals of the European Championship! Gareth gets a fairytale return to Tottenham!
Now here we are, wondering if Bale will get a start in a Europa League last 32 tie against Wolfsberger of Austria. The sense is of everyone standing around with their hands on their hips. Go on, do that thing you used to do. Go on then!
With just two starts and one goal in the Premier League, patience has run out. Bale’s Instagram account claimed to have completed a “good session” at training last week. This was news to his manager Jose Mourinho, who was denied Bale’s services for the FA Cup tie with Everton because of some mystery discomfort of the player’s leg.
Talking about Tottenham’s woes, Gary Neville said that Bale had “wound me up all season watching him smile on the bench”. In this, Bale is seen characterised as that worst of all things in professional football, the expensive malingerer, one who lacks the warrior spirit.
Former Tottenham team-mate Jermaine Jenas spoke this week of how, even as a young player, Bale would withdraw his services at the merest knock. “Harry just used to ignore him and say ‘get out there’,” Jenas said. “To an extent, Jose needs to do something similar now.”
Many see an element of pathos in his Tottenham dotage, a great talent reduced to shuffling about for uneventful seven-minute cameos off the bench, unwilling or unable to make his body do the things it used to do. Breaths are held at the occasional flash of the old powers, like the jinking run against Manchester City last week that culminated in a trundling shot into the arms of Ederson.
Should you feel sorry for him, a man who has lived in a mansion in Madrid with its own swimming pool for most of the last decade? Who pulled in €600,000 a week and built his own personal golf links in his back yard?
Or should we think back to that possibly apocryphal meeting with Ronaldo, in which Bale learned about the lonely reality of life at one of Spain’s big two? He would have realised quickly that he was not at a football club, but rather a royal court, with all the intrigue and plotting that goes with it.
Bale was the plaything of club president Florentino Perez, who resented Ronaldo not only because he had been brought to the club by a previous regime, but also because one man with a preposterously-sized ego quickly recognises another. The Spanish press detailed perceived slights between the two players in the manner of proxy warfare.
Then came Zinedine Zidane as coach, another man with his own dukedom of influence at Real and with whom Bale did not click.
Bale retreated to a quiet life in his mansion with his childhood sweetheart, his golf, and his dreams of Wales. He was criticised for not attending late-night dinners with the team, seeing an early morning tee-off time as a more attractive proposition than listening to Sergio Ramos drone on over patatas bravas.
We are supposed to be affronted by a player who has been paid so much to do so little in the last few years, to see him as a metaphor for a game gone wrong. But you can’t not like a man who took the piss out of Real Madrid the way Bale did, who happily held up a banner that read ‘Wales, Golf, Madrid’, a reference to his perceived order of priorities, after leading his nation to Euro 2020 qualification.
The big two in Spain have gorged themselves to near-death, staggering to the edge of financial oblivion under the weight of their swollen self-importance. Can you blame Bale for taking one of them to the cleaners?
Maybe Tottenham, for whom he has much fonder feelings, are entitled to wonder why they haven’t yet seen the superpowers/magic boots/talent and application that made him famous.
Maybe he should just ‘get out there’.
But then, as Bale learned from Ronaldo many years ago, maybe it’s all about looking after number one.
