Patriotic. Professional. Peerless. In that order.
If ever there has been a British footballer to reach dizzying heights but not receive dizzying acclaim, it is Gareth Bale.
Peerless? There is no other player from these isles with five Champions League medals in his cabinet.
Professional? He might have suffered injuries but his greatest off-the-field misdemeanour was probably a three-putt.
Patriot? Name another figure whose contribution and presence was - or is - so important to his or her national team’s identity, who represented the very essence of that country’s football.
Quite simply, he is a truly towering figure in the history of the Welsh game. Never mind that his Qatari curtain call was a no show-stopper, Bale ’s achievement was in helping his country to get onto that stage for the first time since 1958.
But in some ways, Bale’s patriotism blurred his brilliance for his clubs, for Real Madrid in particular, and the notion that he put country before employer became a slightly damaging one - especially when THAT banner suggested golf also took precedence.
Any suggestion Bale did not get the maximum from his talent during a club career that stretched for a decade and a half is nonsense. Considering the physical issues that confronted him from the outset of his professional days, he could not have achieved more.
After his move from Southampton, there were trying times at Spurs - there were bodily setbacks and that run of playing in 24 matches without a win - but he came through them, came through them with THE hat-trick against Inter Milan in the San Siro, for example.
At the end of the 2012-13 season, the Football Writers Association voted him their Footballer of the Year. Sitting next to Bale that night, it was striking how reserved and how humble he was. A few months later, it was announced he was moving to the Bernabeu.
I was not alone in wondering how this quiet, young Welshman would cope with the pressures of the world’s most demanding club, where you are always only one off-day from having eighty thousand white handkerchiefs waved at you. That was in 2013. Ok, he played very little in the later seasons, but he only officially left the club in 2022.
Never mind the five Champions Leagues, the three La Ligas and the one Copa del Rey, simply being a Real Madrid player for nine years takes some doing. In that Copa del Rey final, Bale scored one of the most remarkable goals in the competition’s history - a feat he repeated in the Champions League final of 2018 against Liverpool.
His bicycle kick, two minutes after coming on as a substitute just after the hour mark, was a dazzling symbol of what Bale’s club career was all about.
This was a player with an appetite for the spectacular, that overhead strike in Kiev a serious rival to Zinedine Zidane’s volley for Real Madrid against Bayer Leverkusen in 2002 as the finest-ever in Champions League final history. It would, of course, end somewhat acrimoniously in Madrid but, let’s face it, most things normally do.
With his Wales duty in mind, Bale kept himself ticking over at Spurs and then in Los Angeles but it soon became clear he had reached heights to which his body could not take him back to.
And that is why his decision to retire at the age of 33 is the right one. He has done his country, himself and, yes, his clubs, proud.
