What's new

Player Watch: Gareth Bale - Retires

Partizan

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2005
6,573
3,405
Knowing about what Giancarlo achieved in Italy, you must be over 70 like me. I'm 73.

Actually I'm a lot younger. It's just that I follow Juventus as my second team and I'm aware of the impact he made as one of the first and overall most succesful foreign players to play in Italy. A true gentleman of the game (Il Gigante Buono)
 

chinaman

Well-Known Member
Jul 19, 2003
17,974
12,423
Actually I'm a lot younger. It's just that I follow Juventus as my second team and I'm aware of the impact he made as one of the first and overall most succesful foreign players to play in Italy. A true gentleman of the game (Il Gigante Buono)

The Gentle Giant.
 

yankspurs

Enic Out
Aug 22, 2013
41,883
71,188
Okay Gareth. Now that you’re home and we’ve answered your 7 year cry for help, you can now cut your hair and get rid of the man bun.
 

Yid

Well Endowed Member
Jul 5, 2013
1,254
1,366
I can't think of any signing that we've made that's had me so emotionally involved.

This. I recall some major signings but none that reached such emotional levels in my history of supporting Spurs!
I'm over the moon with this signing!
???
 

Amo

Well-Known Member
Aug 22, 2013
15,795
31,480

After a while, Gareth Bale almost seemed to relish it: the confrontation, the controversy, the opprobrium. It was as if he had stopped trying to fight it, wasting his energy correcting misunderstandings or railing at willful misinterpretations, and instead invited them to come crashing down on him.

The flag, Bale felt, was just a bit of a joke. He had seen it — the Welsh dragon, festooned with the slogan “Wales, Golf, Madrid, In That Order,” a reference to a chant that had been doing the rounds among the fans of his national team — a few weeks before, and he found it funny enough to demur when his teammates suggested they might like to show it off.

But then came the images of Bale in the games of the socially distanced era, sitting in the stands as he watched Real Madrid play yet another game without his participation, his mind clearly wandering: rolling up a piece of cardboard as a telescope, covering his eyes with his face mask or pretending to drop off to sleep.

It was all a little childish, not especially professional, but essentially harmless: plenty of players joke around during their time on the substitutes’ bench. (There have been rare instances of phones being checked, though to many that is beyond the pale.) But still: those pictures spoke of boredom, of frivolity, of a player who had long since stopped caring.

Bale, deep down, probably had. He knew, by then, that he was not going to play, and that even if he did play, he would not start the next game, or the game after that. Real Madrid’s manager, Zinedine Zidane, had made it abundantly clear he did not have a place in his plans, much less on his team.

Real Madrid’s fans — though absent from the stands — had long since let Bale know that he was no longer welcome. The team’s allies in the Spanish news media had let slip, time and again, that the club’s hierarchy felt the same way. Someone, somewhere had been briefing reporters, over and over, that Bale had long been a distant, detached figure, that he had never bothered learning Spanish, that he preferred to play golf. Bale knew he was not wanted. He was no longer prepared to go along with the charade.

Bale’s war with his employer has been simmering for so long that the strangeness of the situation has been obscured. Until last summer, he was still, after all, Real Madrid’s record signing, by all calculations except the ones they gave to Cristiano Ronaldo. It has hardly been a disastrous investment: in his seven years in Spain, Bale won La Liga twice and the Champions League four times

He has actively won those trophies, too: he has not just been along for the ride. He scored in the final in 2014 — the goal that put Real Madrid ahead in extra time and finally broke Atlético Madrid’s resolve and, as a substitute, two more in the victory over Liverpool in 2018. The first was, perhaps, the finest goal ever scored in a European Cup final.

And yet, now, there is little to no querying of why, exactly, Zidane has no time for a player who has enjoyed such success, and who has, at times, delivered for him. Blame is apportioned not to the coach who has ostracized him, but to the player, for either not justifying his vast salary or foregoing it entirely simply to escape.

The idea that Real Madrid might be so desperate to shed him from its books, meanwhile, that it was willing to allow him to return to his former club, Tottenham Hotspur, on loan — for no fee, and with Spurs covering only half his wages — is seen, if anything, not as madness on the part of Real Madrid but as a risk for Tottenham.

Zidane’s record, of course, helps with all of that, as it is difficult to question too intensely the judgment of a coach who has won three Champions League titles in five attempts. So, too, do those images, the ones that make Bale look reckless and feckless in equal measure, the ones that lend credence to the accusations that he does not mind not playing, as long as he is getting paid, the ones that suggest he is either playing to the gallery or trolling his critics.

And so, without question, does the propaganda campaign that seems to have been waged against Bale — again, so as not to lose sight of how odd this is, a Real Madrid employee — by the club itself. Bale is, by almost any measure, the most successful player Britain has ever exported: only another Welsh star, John Charles, can really lay claim to coming close.

But so successfully and so relentlessly has Bale been depicted as a mercenary, happy just to pick up his paycheck and go and play golf, that even in Britain he is not afforded the reverence that his career warrants. Wales remains fiercely loyal, of course, but to that great, borderless constituency of Premier League fans, Bale will be returning from Spain with his tail between his legs.

As Bale joins Spurs — he and the team confirmed his move on Saturday — he will be seen not as a coup but as either an indulgence — a little reverie on memory lane for Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman — or a luxury. Manchester United considered him, but decided Jadon Sancho was a far better bet. Most fans, of most clubs aside from Tottenham, would agree.

That offers a glimpse not only of the power of the news media to shape perceptions, even when refracted by the interpretation of a second media bloc — what is written in Spanish papers eventually bleeds into their British equivalents — but of just how fickle the business Bale finds himself in can be.

It is at the height of the transfer window that soccer’s goldfish memory, its faddishness and its immediacy, is seen most clearly. The next thing is always the best thing. Potential is always more exciting than proof. As José Mourinho, Bale’s imminent manager, once observed, soccer is a sport that prefers those who have never lost a game, even if they have never played one.

English soccer — perhaps European soccer — has, in a sense, moved on from Bale. He is no longer new and exciting and fresh. The fact that he is, instead, tried and tested and proven is either deemed irrelevant or actively counts against him. Since he left, others have risen to take his place. He is a short-term signing. He is a gamble. He is a busted flush. He is not for us. He is best left to Spurs. He is a player from the past.

And yet, when he returns to the Premier League, he will do so as possibly the most decorated player ever to arrive on these shores. Age and injury may have dimmed his star a little, but memories should not be so short as to forget the force of nature that he once was, and that he might yet — even occasionally — still be. Common sense should dictate that, after seven years at Real Madrid, he might be something more than pace and power.

None of that should be overlooked, and none of it should be forgotten. All that Bale has achieved should not be obscured by the machinations of the Real Madrid machine, or by his succumbing to it. All that he was — all that he might still be, in the right time and the right place — should not be consigned quite so easily to yesterday. Soccer never stops moving; that is what makes it so compelling, so competitive. There are times, though, when it moves just a little too fast for its own good.
 

Scissors&Tape

Well-Known Member
May 17, 2018
259
1,007


Bale’s war with his employer has been simmering for so long that the strangeness of the situation has been obscured. Until last summer, he was still, after all, Real Madrid’s record signing, by all calculations except the ones they gave to Cristiano Ronaldo. It has hardly been a disastrous investment: in his seven years in Spain, Bale won La Liga twice and the Champions League four times

He has actively won those trophies, too: he has not just been along for the ride. He scored in the final in 2014 — the goal that put Real Madrid ahead in extra time and finally broke Atlético Madrid’s resolve and, as a substitute, two more in the victory over Liverpool in 2018. The first was, perhaps, the finest goal ever scored in a European Cup final.

And yet, now, there is little to no querying of why, exactly, Zidane has no time for a player who has enjoyed such success, and who has, at times, delivered for him. Blame is apportioned not to the coach who has ostracized him, but to the player, for either not justifying his vast salary or foregoing it entirely simply to escape.

The idea that Real Madrid might be so desperate to shed him from its books, meanwhile, that it was willing to allow him to return to his former club, Tottenham Hotspur, on loan — for no fee, and with Spurs covering only half his wages — is seen, if anything, not as madness on the part of Real Madrid but as a risk for Tottenham.

Thanks for posting this. Interesting how it is a Manchester-based writer for the New York Times that is able to capture the oddity of RM's treatment of Bale, and how it has seemed to shape perceptions in England.
 

yankspurs

Enic Out
Aug 22, 2013
41,883
71,188
Thanks for posting this. Interesting how it is a Manchester-based writer for the New York Times that is able to capture the oddity of RM's treatment of Bale, and how it has seemed to shape perceptions in England.
Yep. Bale is now underrated. All because one manager hated his guts. Going to be hilarious when he scores a beauty and people remember that wait, he’s actually world class.
 

Dr Benson

Well-Known Member
Aug 22, 2013
465
569
Two things I wonder about: All you who where negative regarding a Bale return (“all his injuries, not the same player anymore, his salaries” etc) when this felt not very realistic and likely not long ago, are you still sceptical about this, or do you feel differently about it now?

I’m still thinking about an option to make it a permanent deal or continue with a loan deal for the 21/22 season. There isn’t any info or rumours on this yet, right? I think that if both Bale and us are lucky, he can have 2-3 really good seasons left for us now.?
 

Bobby TwoShots

Well-Known Member
Aug 8, 2019
496
1,832
has anyone thought the buzz Kane must have from this he was at Spurs as a youth player when Bale scored that hat trick in Milan and went on to become the absolute supernova he was in his last year here. Kane must have idolised him and managed to get what 30 minutes of pitch time with him. He must be absolutely buzzing to play with him as equals and we have had great players with each but when was the last time we had two absolute all time spurs greats playing at the same time?
Should be like watching the Legends team play. But still at their best
 

JCRD

Well-Known Member
Aug 10, 2018
19,153
30,013
Two things I wonder about: All you who where negative regarding a Bale return (“all his injuries, not the same player anymore, his salaries” etc) when this felt not very realistic and likely not long ago, are you still sceptical about this, or do you feel differently about it now?

I’m still thinking about an option to make it a permanent deal or continue with a loan deal for the 21/22 season. There isn’t any info or rumours on this yet, right? I think that if both Bale and us are lucky, he can have 2-3 really good seasons left for us now.?

I wasnt one of the negative ones but can see why people think this could be a negative.

I personally see no downside, it is a huge salary but no fee and see the value in this. The signing is a huge boost for us, for the players, the club and the PL as a whole. I cant wait to see him back in a month

I am concerned though in how we play and whether we get the best out of him given he isnt as quick as he once was. Im intrigued by the dynamic between Bale, Kane and Son. I mean Kane had the biggest go at Son for not passing to him in the first half during the Everton game... how would that play out if it was Bale and how would Kane se himself etc

Im hugely optimistic and think this is just the boost we needed - both signings and not just Bale.
 

etchedchaos

Well-Known Member
Jun 1, 2006
2,670
5,278
It's 3am and I'm trying to binge Bale articles/videos. I go on football365 and there's one article, it's all Diego Jota or Alex Telles bullshit. Shows you how much some sites really don't like us.
 

pook

Well-Known Member
Jul 19, 2009
468
966
Two things I wonder about: All you who where negative regarding a Bale return (“all his injuries, not the same player anymore, his salaries” etc) when this felt not very realistic and likely not long ago, are you still sceptical about this, or do you feel differently about it now? ...

I feel pretty much the same, save being actually excited now (as opposed to when I never dreamt it would happen).

To be fair, I don't see any negative in it, at all. But the question is just how positive it will all turn out. Judging by folks' reactions, it seems like most fans are seeing this in a 'best case scenario' - which, obviously, I'm hoping it will be. But, yeah, skeptical is the right word. There are quite a few factors - injuries, age, commitment*, 'chemistry', etc. - that could move the overall result to anywhere between 'not that big a factor' to 'trophies and glorious football'. I think some folks are likely to be disappointed, as expectations appear so high. I'm hoping that disappointment will be minimal, but we'll just have to wait and see.

I'm all positive about it - absolutely no complaints. But it's relative. And as with all things Spurs, my expectations still lag behind my hopes.


*consider Lloris giving Son a bollocking for not tracking back recently, and it's not terribly difficult to envisage some tensions with the new loanee.
 

Clark28

Well-Known Member
Aug 31, 2016
2,269
13,040
In his interview he mentioned playing and winning finals, and the mentality that took.

Hopefully we get some decent cup runs this season, having his big game experience will be massive for us.
 
Top