Gareth Bale produced the greatest single moment by any British footballer since 1966. Overhead kicks are football’s fantasia, demanding the peak of at least three pursuits to be executed perfectly. For the majesty of the finish, the magnitude of the occasion and the difference it made to the destiny of the match in combination, only Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick goal can eclipse it and Bale still has him beaten on two of the three.
As Bale retires at the age of 33, we should reflect on why that goal in the 2018 Champions League final against Liverpool, and everything that came before it, never quite propelled him onto the highest plane in the consciousness of the British public. Bale did all that is ever asked of his breed: break through young; overcome early struggles; dominate in England; test yourself abroad and flourish; win trophies; position yourself front and centre of the biggest moments; lead your country.
Can anyone else in the history of the British game say they have completed that same list? David Beckham never won the European Cup outside England. Kevin Keegan excelled at Hamburg to win the Ballon d’Or but never scored for England at a major tournament. Perhaps Wayne Rooney came closest, but he left England only when the legs had grown weary beyond sustainable repair. Bale excelled by each measure.
Maybe we are squinting at this all wrong. If Bale’s career, with all its typical marker posts of greatness, does not feel like a suitable attestation of his talent, that only pays inadvertent homage to the talent itself. At Tottenham, the infamously sticky start gave way to a karmic response of the likes we have rarely seen. English audiences had grown accustomed to foreign imports making defenders look foolish. Here was a slight, early-twenty-something winger from Cardiff who grabbed hold of the world and dropped it at his own left foot.
In Madrid, all of the glory but never quite the same comic book superhero, Billy the Whizz chaos to Bale’s brilliance. Did Bale just become a little too refined, a little too Real? Or was he just out of sight and mind too often? For all that we urge our sporting stars to move abroad, they can quickly slip from the radar in the vast gaps between the flashpoints.
Rather than Bale’s achievements leaving us a little cold, then, it was Bale himself. British football has always demanded that its heroes look as if brilliance never came without football’s anachronistic Holy Trinity: blood, sweat and tears. Bale was not just ill-fitting with those prerequisites – he was a willing antidote. He had a laconic grace and the fat percentage of an ancient Greek statue. He had a top knot. He was frequently injured. He freely admitted that football was not his whole world, nor likely even his favourite sport.
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Only with the benefit of retrospection will we be able to fully recognise Bale as a difference maker to Welsh sport, the only man whose marble pillar stands as tall as John Charles’. It wasn’t that Wales hadn’t had brilliant individuals before – Mark Hughes, Ian Rush, Ryan Giggs and Neville Southall were all arguably the best players in their role for at least a moment in time or more. But never before had one individual had such a demonstrably potential-affirming impact on those around him.
When Bale wrote on Monday that the Wales team lives within him and runs through his veins, you believe him. He proved that not just through the example he set on the pitch, but his humility around the teammates who became friends who became brothers. Time and again they were asked about Bale’s personality, every time the same response: laugh, look down for a second and then explain, in one way or another, that he was a normal guy from Cardiff who was never happier than when there was no expectation of him to be anything other than a normal guy from Cardiff.
That personality was kept deliberately hidden. In places it was mistakenly interpreted as a vacuum. Bale enjoyed his happiest moments on his own terms. Why talk to a Spanish media that has vilified you? Why meet someone more than halfway who won’t offer the same privilege? He was not interested in bland epithets from those who did not know him. During the first lockdown, Bale donated a million pounds, split equally between Spain and Wales, to health boards to thank them for their tireless work helping Covid-19 patients.
Life at Madrid, if not in Madrid, did go stale. For a time Bale was the club’s highest-paid player and he was barely playing. He refused to tear up a contract that his club had asked him to sign, preferring his own freedom of choice. Were it anyone else, that may have caused a weary, bleak conclusion to a career lost on the wind.
Not here. If there is one artery that runs through Bale’s career, one thing that makes him virtually unique, it is that he didn’t need club football at all. Bale’s greatest nights were not in Kiev nor Lisbon, as magic as they may have been, but at the Cardiff City Stadium against Austria and Ukraine when Wales ended their generations of World Cup absence and when the Red Wall sang Calon Lan so loud it made you feel Welsh by sheer osmosis. He won those ties, not on his own but because of him more than anyone else. That is how a country will remember a career. That, surely, is how Bale will too.
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