Gareth Bale discovers that hell hath no fury like a Madridista scorned

Gareth Bale has hit back at the Spanish newspaper Marca over their comments about him, and their response hasn’t exactly been dignified.

Perhaps it was always inevitable that it would end like this. In a world in which footballers are treated as little more than commodities by both clubs and the media, perhaps there was ineviability about the petulance of what has been happening now between the Real Madrid-obsessed Spanish newspaper Marca and Gareth Bale. Bale’s spectacular brace for Wales against Austria in the World Cup play-off semi-finals has prompted a most peculiar outburst in the Marca and El Chiringuito, the football show that achieved viral fame with its troublingly obsessive-looking coverage of Lionel Messi’s transfer from Barcelona to PSG and Kylian Mbappe’s failure to sign a contract with Real Madrid.

It was pretty clear that Gareth Bale had a message to send to somebody during the Wales vs Austria game, as he shouted ‘SUCK THAT!’ into a microphone while celebrating his first goal, and it wasn’t difficult to guess who he meant. The newspaper Marca had already run a story in which they described Bale as a ‘parasite’ over their perception that he’s running down the clock until the end of his contract with the club, and after the match El Chiringuito’s absurd histrionics stepped up another gear when one of their pundits claimed that he should be ‘fired’ for ‘disrespecting’ Real.

The latter of these two comments was just plain stupid, rather than particularly offensive. It’s vanishingly unlikely that Real Madrid would legally be able to fire him for upsetting their media fee-fees, and even if this were the case, with his contract expiring at the end of June regardless, it’s highly doubtful that it would be the