Is this it for Gareth Bale at Real Madrid: Champions League final

Real Madrid are playing in the Champions League final in Cardiff on Saturday – but Gareth Bale looks set to miss out against Juventus in his home city.

Wales forward Bale has been out with a calf injury for the past six weeks and, although he has now returned to full training, the former Tottenham player admitted he has not fully recovered from an ankle operation earlier in the season – and he also believes that caused the latest problem.

With the team’s other 10 places more or less set in stone, the debate about whether Bale or Isco should be named in Zinedine Zidane’s starting line-up has been the talking point in Spain in the build-up to Saturday’s final, in which Real could complete their first league and European double since 1958.

And more significantly, it has become much more than a debate about this game, with Bale’s longer-term future at the Bernabeu under more scrutiny than at any other time since he arrived from Tottenham for a world-record fee four years ago.

Writing in Marca on Monday, for example, Roberto Palomar headlined his article: “And what if selling Bale isn’t such a bad idea?”

He claimed that “in time, his absence stops being a problem” and also argued that, for Real fans, the sight of Isco, Marco Asensio or Nacho watching from the stands is “more painful” than the absence of Bale, who “doesn’t even provoke nostalgia”.

And he concluded it might not be a bad thing if an English club, “fresh from failure and with hot pockets”, manages to prise the 27-year-old away from the Spanish capital.

So is Bale’s time at Real Madrid really coming to an end?

Source: BBC