Bale will simply grin and bear Jose antics
Madrid star has the experience to cope with Mourinho show
IF anyone was going to prove resistant to the charms of Jose Mourinho’s tough love and dark arts, it was likely to be Gareth Bale.
With four Champions League winners’ medals in his locker, the Welshman is one of the few who can boast of being twice as successful in Europe’s premier competition as Mourinho.
The Spurs manager can shout, holler, sympathise or agitate as much as he likes, he simply isn’t that special to the Spurs player.
All the noise goes over Bale’s head — regardless of which of his palatial homes in London, south Wales and Spain he’s sitting in.
Bale is 31 and probably the first to accept he’s hardly pulled up any trees since accepting a lucrative loan back at Tottenham from Real Madrid.
Yet his record of four goals in 15 games this season stands favourably with zero goals in 25 games produced by Steven Bergwijn, often the player preferred by Mourinho on the right of a 4-3-3 formation. Yesterday at Manchester City, Bale returned to the bench having been left out of the 18 altogether in midweek.
This time, it was Lucas Moura (6 goals in 32) who got the nod, although Bale seemed happy enough in the warm-up, sharing a joke and a smile with Harry Winks.
Mourinho once knew exactly which buttons to press when engaging with superstars, but not so much these days. The end of his days as a worldclass manager can be traced back to 2015 when he picked a fight involving Eden Hazard at Chelsea after the Belgian received treatment during a game against Swansea.
He then turned on Paul Pogba at
Manchester United. On both occasions, the clubs viewed their very valuable playing asset as more important than the manager and Mourinho was sacked.
It’s slightly different this time. Spurs are borrowing Bale, rather than owning him. As long as Harry Kane and Son Heung-min are in the building, Daniel Levy has other worthy shirt-sellers.
It is possible an awkward stand-off between Mourinho and Bale could last for the full the season. Spurs are not ready to sacrifice their manager and Bale will hope to go back to Madrid in the summer, with a reboot at Real should Zinedine Zidane leave.
Bale has another 12 months on his Real contract after this season, another £15million to earn, and then he can decide whether to globetrot for more lucre or hang up his boots to concentrate fully on golf.
Mourinho is a master of media manipulation but, again, Bale has more experienced influencers in his corner than your average footballer.
The training picture put out by the player to try and oppose Mourinho’s narrative that he was unavailable for the 5- 4 defeat at Everton on Wednesday was a ‘contradiction in reality’ according to the manager.
Bale believes Mourinho is creating an issue about him as a distraction f r om i nterrogations over why Tottenham are outside the top four and out of the FA Cup.
If Mourinho expects the ‘will-he, won’t-he play’ sideshow to put fire in Bale’s belly and raise him to the world-class standards of his first spell at White Hart Lane, it is probably the wrong tactic.
At this stage of his career, Bale is more likely to shrug his selection status off than laugh or cry.