By Alex Reid
This feature appears in the current edition of sport magazine.
Europe has several big football clubs, but only one that judges itself on the highest altar of all. Don’t believe us? Consider England’s two most successful sides. Manchester United endured an agonising, 26-year wait without a domestic league title from 1966/67 to 1992/93. Liverpool fans look back to their previous league win in 1989/90 and wince. Their wait is growing.
It’s natural that England’s big clubs gauge their success by this marker. Real Madrid judge themselves on a similar criteria. Yet their domain is all of Europe. This is a club that marks its success in relation to the continent’s biggest prize; that considers the European Cup (or Champions League) its benchmark. When the club won that trophy for the 10th time in 2014, it had been just 12 years since the their previous triumph. Most clubs would gladly settle for a Champions League win every 12 years. To those at Real Madrid, the wait felt like a lifetime.
Gareth Bale offers a shy smile when Sport asks him how much pressure there was to win the fabled La Decima when he signed in 2013. “Massive,” is the word he settles on. “It literally felt like the reason they signed me. Whenever I spoke to the president here [Florentino Perez], he was always telling me: ‘We’ve signed you to win the 10th Champions League.’”
Bale dreamed of playing for Madrid. At his 2013 unveiling, a photograph of Bale as a boy grinning in a Real shirt loomed large on club TV screens. We suggest that his father, seeing his son’s prodigious talent, bought a job-lot of replica kits for Europe’s top clubs and got him to pose in each – just in case such a photo was ever needed. The 26-year-old laughs in response.
“No, I just loved watching Real Madrid when I was a young kid,” he says. “I loved the white kit, the players playing for them, the special football they played, the goals they scored… I remember when Steve McManaman came over, then David Beckham, then Michael Owen. I started watching more and more. Just seeing top British players playing alongside the likes of Brazilian Ronaldo, Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Roberto Carlos was amazing.”
Zidane, assistant coach to Carlo Ancelotti when Bale joined the club, is now Real manager. Does he ever get involved in training? “He did in my first season!” says Bale. “He dropped the shoulder on me a few times as well. I grew up watching him. Such a good player, he was.”
MEET BART SIMPSON
Watching a Champions League match at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium is a unique experience. There are plenty of excited ‘day trippers’ at big Premier League clubs, but this is a different level. Excited visitors from France, Japan and China clamour outside the gargantuan 85,000-capacity stadium, posing for pictures with a man in a giant Bart Simpson costume plus Real Madrid kit (though we doubt he was endorsed by either club or cartoon). It feels more like Times Square on a Saturday night than the preamble to a football match. The stadium fills up late (well, this is Spain), but it is packed full when the match begins.
Before Real score, however, the atmosphere is slightly unusual. Alert, but also pensive. A friendly voice sat beside us offers an explanation: “The fans are quiet; they have such high expectations. Whatever is normal at a football club, they expect three times as much. If the team score three, they want four. That’s why it takes a special player to play here.”
Sport’s new amigo isn’t referring to talent – that’s a given. He taps the side of his head: “It’s the mental strength needed to play for these fans. Not everyone can do it. You need to have a mental resilience not to fall before these expectations.”
Bale concurs. “Being here is like being under a microscope,” he says. “It’s a lot easier to go out in England. Here, the sole focus is football. They have whole newspapers dedicated to Real Madrid. But that’s just part of being a Real Madrid player – you get used to it.”
Bale seems settled into life in the Spanish capital. Scoring match-winning goals in the finals of the Copa del Rey and Champions League (against rivals Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, no less) in your first season probably helps. Yet he felt the fierce gaze of media scrutiny last year.
“I feel like I’ve grown up [since I arrived], especially since you’re not in your comfort zone any more,” he tells us. “You’re really thrown into the deep end – and I think maybe last year, I didn’t play so well in the second half of the season. In a way, I’m quite glad it happened, because it has made me a stronger person, a stronger player. You learn more from when things are not going well than if you were just a winner. I’ve really benefited from it.”
Fitness niggles have disrupted Bale’s third season in Spain, but he has also looked in excellent form in the middle (scoring 11 goals in his past eight games, although he hasn’t played since January 17). Madrid will want him back fit for the Champions League crunch matches, not least because it represents perhaps their ultimate challenge of the modern era.
GALACTICO TO CLASICO
When the European Cup first came into existence 60 years ago this season, Real Madrid’s name was the first on the cup. Four years later, it was still the only name on the trophy. The galactico policy of signing the world’s best players that caught the eye of a young Bale didn’t begin in the late 1990s – it stretches back to the 1950s.
Real Madrid built a team around their greatest player, Alfredo Di Stefano, but improved it each year. Raymond Kopa played superbly for French club Stade Reims against Real Madrid in the 1956 final. He was quickly convinced to switch sides. In 1958, after two years out of the game and at least two stone overweight, Hungary’s glorious galloping major Ferenc Puskas signed. He slimmed down (well, a bit) and shone. So it goes.
Take the tour around the Bernabeu and, alongside the rich history of mementos, boots worn by great players and Ballon d’Or awards, two things stand out. One is a FIFA Club of the Century award, underlining Real’s status as the most successful club side of the 20th century. Then, at the end, 10 European Cup/ Champions League trophies stand proudly in a row inside a glass case filled with a constant whirl of gold and silver paper. A bit like the end of The Crystal Maze, but admittedly more impressive.
Whisper it quietly around these parts, but the newest version of this trophy resides not in Madrid. It’s in Barcelona. With one win each from the past two Champions League finals, the rivalry between the two clubs stands tall above European football. It’s never been more fierce. But there must be figures at both clubs who realise it is terrific for business.
In his book Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid, Sid Lowe covers why the labels attached to both clubs (Real as the establishment club, Barca the rebels) isn’t just a simplification but often plain wrong. However there’s one quote in the book, from former Real Madrid player and manager Jorge Valdano, that sums it all up: “If Barcelona didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.”
They are two clubs constantly trying to one-up one another, pushing each other to greater heights. It’s Barcelona who currently top the pile in La Liga. Now, however, they’re stepping on Real’s patch of Europe, with three Champions League titles in the past seven years. In 2016, they’re aiming to be the first club to retain the trophy since AC Milan in 1990.
“My plan when I first started playing football was to try and reach the pinnacle – and Real Madrid is the pinnacle of football teams,” Bale tells us, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And yet it’s now Barcelona looking to carve out a fresh piece of European history.
The good news for Real is that stopping Barcelona is in their own hands. The two Spanish clubs – along with Bayern Munich – are favourites for this season’s Champions League. Wouldn’t it be just like Real to gatecrash Barca’s party? ‘La Undecima’ is Spanish for ‘The Eleventh’ – just in case you need to know.
Gareth Bale is an ambassador for BT Sport: the new home of the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League exclusively
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário