Gareth Bale is struggling to regain his battered reputation as a soccer star after his return to the Premier League took on airs of failure after failing to live up to expectations at Tottenham.
When Bale arrived at Spurs on loan from Real Madrid in September, it was considered the ideal way to relaunch his career to return to the club that launched him to stardom.
But just five months later, the fiasco is so great that few imagine the Welshman to continue with Spurs next season, especially if José Mourinho remains on the bench, after the relationship between the two is practically broken.
The 31-year-old Welsh attacker is increasingly missing from the Portuguese coach’s plans.
The level exhibited in his first stage at Tottenham and which led Real Madrid to pay 85 million pounds (about 97 million euros; 118 million dollars) in 2013 is already a distant memory.
Despite the fact that the relationship between Bale and Real Madrid was broken for some time, some pointed out that it was due to the clash of personalities between the striker and coach Zinedine Zidane and did not attribute it to the fact that, simply, the best Bale was already a From the past.
– Loss of desire? –
Despite winning the Champions League four times with the ‘Merengues’, scoring in two finals, and the Spanish championship in another two, Bale never quite fit in at the Bernabéu.
Despite the fact that his commitment to the Welsh team seems intact, the complacent attitude towards the two clubs that pay his salary (the press assures that Real Madrid and Tottenham pay half the 600,000 weekly pounds that the player earns), suggests that Bale he lost his appetite and the desire to work required to maintain himself at the highest level.
Since Bale returned to London, the ‘Spurs’ have played 22 games, but Mourinho is so disappointed with his performance that he only played seven of them, and only two as a starter.
Perhaps Bale’s fate in London was written from the day he made his debut, delayed by injury, with Tottenham, in a London derby against West Ham that the ‘Spurs’ won 3-0 before the Welshman’s departure and that it ended in a tie at three goals.
In his second game he scored the winning goal against Brighton and everything seemed to be getting better … but that is the only goal he has scored with the ‘Spurs’ in the Premier and one of the four he has scored counting all the competitions.
For the first time, last weekend, Mourinho publicly questioned Bale’s commitment to the team, after the player posted a message on Instagram vindicating his good work during training, hours before he was left out of the call for the FA Cup match against Everton, which the ‘Spurs’ ended up losing.
Mourinho assured that it was the player who told him that he was not fit to play: “Since the beginning of the season, I have tried to manage everything in private, in the dressing room, but I felt I needed to address the situation.”
– Mourinho explodes –
“I probably have no responsibility for the message, I don’t know. But the ‘post’ showed ‘a great training session and I’m prepared’ was completely wrong,” added the Portuguese.
From the bench, Bale jumped in the closing minutes last Saturday in the loss to Manchester City and once again had little impact on his team’s game.
“I look at him and he’s a world-class player, coming back to the club that he loves, but seems happy to stay on the bench,” former Liverpool manager Graeme Souness recently criticized.
Bale has become a specialist in the Europa League, a minor tournament for the ambitious London club, having started all six matches in the first phase, thus allowing the two starting forwards, Harry Kane and Son, to rest. Heung-min.
With Tottenham going through a bad time (one win and four losses in the last five Premier League games and eliminated by Everton in the FA Cup), Mourinho should make rotations next Thursday in the first leg of the round of 32 of the Europa League against the modest Austrian Wolfsberg.
Although Mourinho gives Bale the opportunity to save the category again, few bet that the Welshman will take advantage of it.
smg / bsp / mcd / psr
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