Pilloried by club, a hero for country: Gareth Bale draws comparisons to Brazil's Ronaldo

He was branded a "traitor", as "monstrously ungrateful" by the club who had employed him for several years. He had been written off as a lost cause. And yet, when he put on his national team jersey, the anxieties and the injuries appeared to fade away. He seemed inspired.

So it was with Brazil’s Ronaldo when he went to the first World Cup staged in Asia, with a scratchy pair of domestic seasons for Inter Milan behind him, an apparently chronic set of fitness problems trailing him. He ended up as the leading goalscorer at the 2002 tournament, won that year’s Ballon D’Or, and after he joined Real Madrid from an angry Inter later in the summer, you could barely avoid seeing his beaming, toothy smile as his career resurrected.

World Cups can act as exhilarating medicine for a footballer’s professional lifespan, and with the qualification of Wales for a finals for the first time in 64 years comes a reminder of how national service contrasts with everyday form. The 2022 Welsh equivalent to Brazil’s Ronaldo of 2002 is easily identified: as the captain who broke the long Wales drought, Gareth Bale has added to his status as their chief figurehead.

Almost inevitably, it was from Bale’s free-kick, deflected, that Wales scored the goal against Ukraine in Sunday’s play-off final to clinch their place at Qatar. It was Bale’s two goals against Austria that won the semi-final, and Bale’s hat-trick, including a stoppage-time winner, that earned the three points in Belarus to help edge Wales into the play-off lane.

That’s six crucial interventions this season without which Wales would be counting up wearily to 66 years absent from World Cups.

Eight days before what Bale called “the final piece of the jigsaw” for his generation of Welsh