Gareth Bale: Some players shrink on the grand stage – he crowned it

The Copa del Rey final, when they took him off the pitch on that extravagant arc by which he sensationally circumnavigated Marc Bartra. The Champions League final, when they arranged themselves in an airborne perpendicular, plucking an act of pure imagination from the sky. At Bale’s peak, you could look at those legs in the moments before kick-off and wonder by what kinetic twitch within them another schoolboy daydream would be transfigured into reality.

At the age of 33, and despite briefly flirting with the idea of recommitting to Euro 2024, Bale has announced his retirement. It has been a hell of a career. At one point, he had not won so much as a game in his first 24 appearances for Tottenham Hotspur. From that moment on, he won five Champions Leagues, three La Liga titles and 111 Wales caps, taking his nation to the semi-finals of Euro 2016 and to the World Cup for the first time in 64 years. Some players shrink on the grandest occasions; Bale made a habit of crowning them with magnificent and spectacular feats, and made being brilliant at football look ridiculously fun.

Bale was an incredible player in several different ways. In his early years and his prime, he had pure speed and the rare ability to compute and execute with meticulous accuracy at the highest pace. He was thrillingly athletic: so much so that his two most famous goals came from beyond the ordinary, earthly dimensions of the game – the pitch literally could not contain him. Time eroded his physical gifts but even as his game tapered and his influence shrank, he remained an incredibly decisive player, especially for Wales, for whom he was at times a one-man rescue act. He started by starting fires; he finished by putting them out all over the place.

For all the thrill of those early, spiky-haired years with Tottenham, really Bale’s greatness hinges on his accomplishments with two teams: Real Madrid and Wales. The weird paradox of Bale’s career was that though he and Real ended up implacably opposed, publicly throwing shade at each other, looking like a tragically ill-suited marriage of motivations and priorities, in reality they made each other great.

The long and toxic endgame was unedifying, but Bale’s Bernabeu years were a phenomenal success. He finished with 106 goals (more than Ronaldo Nazario) and 65 assists (only one fewer than Zinedine Zidane) in 258 appearances for the club. Britain’s is an insular, travel-wary football culture; Bale, the homely boy from the valleys, stands without parallel as the greatest export from these isles in the past 50 years.

Perhaps even more impressive, though, was what he accomplished with the dragon on his chest. The high point was that incredible campaign at Euro 2016, where Wales, in their first major tournament since 1958, reached the semi-finals. But Bale turned that fairytale into a prolonged spell of gravity-defiance, establishing Wales in the top 25 of the Fifa rankings for six years, for much of them as the smallest nation therein. Bale should go down, alongside Bryan Robson and Steven Gerrard, as the best embodiment of that British ideal of captaincy: thunderously inspirational, able through sheer force of will to warp the ordinary gravity of a match. But he didn’t just drag a recalcitrant team to the brink of glory: he elevated those around him, imbuing a sense of shared mission, and never once letting any of the many inferior players with whom he shared that crest feel intimidated in his presence. To them, he was just “Gaz”.

In the end, having propelled Wales to the World Cup with one last heave, scoring all three of their goals in the play-off semi-final against Austria and final against Ukraine, Bale had nothing left. There was to be no final adventure. Perhaps some will say that he didn’t love football enough, that he didn’t have the right attitude, that he could have gone on for longer. But his was a brilliant career, stuffed with stupendous moments, and though he achieved fame, numbers, trophies, the accumulation of those things never really seemed to be his objective. He played, it always seemed, for the sheer pleasure and thrill of the game and he gave just as much of that as he got.

Originally published as Gareth Bale: Some players shrink on the grand stage – he crowned it