My anger at final snub set me up for THAT goal
This is the first time Gareth Bale has told the story of that goal, frame-by-frame, and the most extraordinary part of it all was his state of mind moments before Marcelo’s ball dropped into his eye-line and Liverpool learned what devastation feels like.
‘Angry. Quite angry, to be honest,’ he says, describing his mindset when Zinedine Zidane finally sent him into May’s Champions League final, from the substitutes’ bench.
‘Obviously, i felt i deserved to start the game. i’d been scoring goals. so yeah, i suppose it was hard to put the anger aside.’
he had scored four goals in three games heading into Kiev’s Olympic stadium — including one against Villarreal a week earlier. he had been on the field for three minutes in the Ukrainian capital before he continued the sequence.
What transpired, four minutes beyond the hour mark, required more than a capacity to shut out the residual emotion that sports psychologists talk about. Bale also had to shut the door on doubt, because, as he reveals in this conversation, he had never before scored a goal with an overhead kick.
To the ordinary player, anxiety would enter the equation before a global audience of 300 million, though what he describes sounds very much like a still, small calm in his interior mind as Marcelo’s cross came in.
he describes a subliminal awareness of James Milner and Virgil van Dijk, the Liverpool players drifting through his peripheral vision, though that made things less complicated by removing alternatives.
‘You could opt to take the ball down and do something then,’ he says. ‘But you know you are in a situation where if you’re going to get closed down you have to try something.
‘You certainly don’t really think about looking stupid. if you don’t try things, things never happen. if you have time to think about it, it doesn’t come off. it’s when you have to make those reaction decisions that you normally tend to get the best results . . . ’
so he took a leap of faith, looping his boot under the ball to send it on its arc into the net. he had been filmed doing this at a Wales training camp three years ago, but Austria’s heinz Linder was one of a number of goalkeepers to keep such a Bale effort out, in a World Cup qualifier in september 2017.
‘i knew exactly where the ball went and i think you can see in the video my head turns to look exactly where the ball is going,’ adds Bale.
‘i knew as soon as i hit it i knew it was good.’ The fall to the turf was light. ‘No, you don’t feel it!’ And then, for the moment the ball takes to reach the net, there was just stillness. ‘it was quite a weird silence for about a split second. Then everything erupted. i remember Marcelo and (Toni) Kroos running because i could see them coming and then everyone piled on.
‘Better than Cristiano Ronaldo’s goal against Juventus?’ This question is put to Bale by nine-year-old huddersfield schoolgirl Charlotte McLellan as she grills him in an interview to be released by BT sport this week. Bale’s inquisitor is also the star of a new BT sport advert.
Bale finds a diplomatic answer about the merits of Ronaldo’s quarter-final goal: ‘it’s not for me to say!’
he is mystified as to why the goal did not feature in a UEFA poll of the top ten Champions League goals of the season.
‘i don’t know how it wasn’t on that list!’ he says. ‘i want to know who is on the panel because they want to be sacked.’
The scissor kick was not the end of things in Kiev, of course. There was the 83rd-minute strike which ended Liverpool’s night and Loris Karius’s career at Liverpool, though the abuse the German took belied a level of difficulty for him that some did not appreciate, Bale thinks.
‘i always try and put a bit of wobble on the ball,’ he points out. ‘it’s the same with free-kicks. You try to make it more difficult because, if it doesn’t go in the corner, i always give them a problem if it’s right down their throat.’
he didn’t see much of the Liverpool team that night but he did console Karius. ‘i just said: “Keep your head up”, he relates. ‘Mistakes happen. it’s just unfortunate it’s in a final.
‘Yes, i suppose it’s not quite as bad as it looked but i suppose he should save it.’
That residual anger had long gone by the end, though Bale did insist later that night that he needed to ‘be playing week-in, week-out’ and hinted that he was ready to leave if he had to. But within five days, Zidane had resigned as Real coach and a further six weeks later Ronaldo was off to Juventus.
he wears the demeanour of an individual reborn under a manager, Julen Lopetegui, who has restored him to the Real starting Xi from which Zidane unfathomably excluded him. it is a side no longer subservient to the giant presence of Cristiano Ronaldo. Bale has scored in the side’s three La Liga games this season, making it nine in eight games, in a run extending back to the end of last season.
You sense Ronaldo’s departure has let the light flood in on those — including Bale — who were operating under his shadow.
‘i think obviously it’s going to be a little different from having such a big player there,’ says Bale.
‘it’s maybe a bit more relaxed, yes. i suppose there is more of a team, more working as one unit rather than one player.’
Lopetegui’s English makes communication easy, in a way that it was not with Zidane, who does not speak the language.
‘Obviously it helps,’ says Bale. ‘in spanish i can talk (to a manager) but maybe not go into that amount of detail with them that i would need to.’
Bale passes on the question of whether he fundamentally considers Lopetegui a better manager than Zidane: ‘i’m not sure i want to answer that.’
it’s five years since he left the Premier League, the landscape of which has changed beyond recognition in that time. sir Alex Ferguson, Brendan Rodgers and Tim sherwood were among the managerial personnel back then.
There’s part of him that would like to test himself in that environment again.
‘You can say yes and no,’ he says, when asked if he’d like to be back here one day.
‘You always want to come back and play in your home league and a part of you will always miss home. But i’m also enjoying playing for the biggest club in the world and winning trophies.’