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Anyone remember that Bale chap?

Was funny to look back at that. I do wonder, if Bale had gone to the lower leagues as a unwanted left back would he ever have become the wordlclass winger/ striker who plays for Real Madrid? I think right now he'd be at a club like Derby as an unspectacular left back.

PS Thank GHod we never got Babel...

It shows how much success at highest level is talent +luck +timing +development time (and often a team that is willing to allow focus on you).

Spurs has been almost the perfect club for players like Bale, Modric, Carrick, high enough to play the game to win, and be involved with, played against top tier opponents, yet still be willing to build the system around/accommodate talent and give sufficient playing time to develop.

No question in my mind, neither Carrick nor Bale would have got anywhere near the clubs they ended up at without Spurs.

And you could look at current squad and see Kane & Dier as players that could end up at that top tier, but could have easily been discarded to lower levels.
 
It shows how much success at highest level is talent +luck +timing +development time (and often a team that is willing to allow focus on you).

Spurs has been almost the perfect club for players like Bale, Modric, Carrick, high enough to play the game to win, and be involved with, played against top tier opponents, yet still be willing to build the system around/accommodate talent and give sufficient playing time to develop.

No question in my mind, neither Carrick nor Bale would have got anywhere near the clubs they ended up at without Spurs.

And you could look at current squad and see Kane & Dier as players that could end up at that top tier, but could have easily been discarded to lower levels.

I dunno that's right in this case, Bale always had this (no...) ceiling, there is a reason we paid that much for a kid and that all the clubs in the PL were after him.

I think the rumours were just that, Redknapp might have found an angle but Levy had always been advised otherwise.

It's funny really, as awesome as things are now, if we'd kept him Poch would still be at SCBC and Kane would probably be at Norwich.
 
I dunno that's right in this case, Bale always had this (no...) ceiling, there is a reason we paid that much for a kid and that all the clubs in the PL were after him.

I think the rumours were just that, Redknapp might have found an angle but Levy had always been advised otherwise.

It's funny really, as awesome as things are now, if we'd kept him Poch would still be at SCBC and Kane would probably be at Norwich.
Not sure they were just rumours. Reports of a planned loan or permanent move come the January 2009 window started to surface around November 2009 but at the time Harry kept pretty shtum about them. Bale had been getting very few appearances from the bench following his long lay-off and recovery period from an operation the previous season.

Then came the injury to BAE so Harry had no option but to turn to Bale for the LB position. The Welsh Wizard instantly started to show great form and quickly became undroppable. So when BAE recovered he was slotted back in at LB and Harry moved moved Gareth forward into the troublesome left-mid position. By now Harry was declaring publicly Bale was going nowhere, he was far too good a talent blah, blah, blah.

Which is all very interesting because Clive Allen has since claimed Redknapp was definitely prepared to let him go!

My guess is that once Bale had begun to show his true potential Levy put his foot down. No way was he going to give up that easily on an investment originally agreed at £10m (£5m up front and £5m based on performances) so it looks like he told Redknapp to forget it, leaving the Spurs manager to take full credit saying he never would have dreamt of selling such an exceptional talent in the first place.
 
How Bale transformed himself from being a jinx into world-beater

Harry Redknapp


It seems incredible now, but it was not so long ago that Alex Ferguson was advising me not to play Gareth Bale at Tottenham because he was never on a winning side.

Gareth had that horrendous statistic hanging round his neck of not winning a game, which ultimately stretched to 24 games, when we went to play Manchester United at Old Trafford.

After the game, Alex said to me: "Bloody hell, Harry, it must be difficult for you to put him on the field."

Alex was big on superstitions and I am still not sure to this day whether he was joking or not, but it was clearly a huge topic.

It was not a nice thing for Gareth to deal with and it must have affected him. Whether he started the game or came off the bench, Spurs did not win, and it became a bit of a joke outside the club - and inside the dressing room as well.


Gareth just got on with it. Eventually, we won a game with him in the team, beating Burnley 5-0, and he never looked back.

Now, he is comfortably one of the best five players in world football and I am backing him to finish as the leading scorer at Euro 2016.

Bale has really relished the role he has for Wales and in France he has proved beyond doubt that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Neymar.

Northern Ireland are in for a really difficult evening today and Gareth can wreak absolute havoc against them - as he did against Russia in the final group game. If I was Northern Ireland manager Michael O'Neill, I would be thinking, 'My GHod, how do we stop him?' because it is a game Bale can really take a hold of. He is the main man for them, the star turn, and he has got everything as a player.

The first time I saw him was at Southampton, when he was about 14. He was one of the kids coming through with Theo Walcott and was the name on everyone's lips in the academy. He broke into their team a year or so later and then Spurs snapped him up pretty quickly.

I watched him play for Spurs at Fulham, while I was manager of Portsmouth, and remember thinking what a player he was going to be.

He played as a wing-back that day, with Spurs playing a three-man defence, but he was left out the following week.

When I was appointed at Spurs, his confidence was low and he needed a run because that jinx of never winning was showing no sign of ending.

Gareth would have been the best left-back in the world if he had stayed in that role. He played there for me against Benfica one night and I have never seen a performance like it. He must have run from his own penalty area to their byline about 15 times in the game - it was incredible.

It was a natural progression to move him forward and I switched him with Luka Modric. I moved Modric to central midfield, where he did not play and people said he was not strong enough, but he really flourished and we pushed Gareth forward one.

Gareth had a couple of years when he was simply unstoppable, he was running everybody ragged. Your instructions as a manager were really simple before the game: give the ball to Gareth.

Teams were petrified of him and it was arguably that night at Inter Milan in October 2010 which made everybody across the world sit up and take notice.

Maicon was supposed to be the best right-back in the world, but Gareth scared the life out of him. We had 10 men but he scored a hat-trick and we would have got something out of the game if we had have had another five minutes.

Gareth was a dream to manage. He was never a minute's problem, came out and trained hard every day. We'd give him a few days off to go back to Wales, but never had to worry about what he was doing while he was away because he was such a family man.

Now he is one of the most recognised players in world football and only six goals behind Ian Rush's record for Wales. I can see Wales going further in the competition with him in this kind of form - it's wide open for them.

http://www.independent.ie/sport/soc...m-being-a-jinx-into-worldbeater-34831910.html
 
"Bale has really relished the role he has for Wales and in France he has proved beyond doubt that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Neymar. (And of course I had a hand in making them what they are today as well...........)":rolleyes:
 
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"Bale has really relished the role he has for Wales and in France he has proved beyond doubt that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Neymar. (And of course I had a hand in making them what they are today as well...........)":rolleyes:

Indeed, lets all hail king " rent a quote".
 
There is talk that within the next year Gareth Bale will be done with his Spanish adventure and will set his sights on returning to England to live and try and win the PL.

I'd like to think that achieving that with Spurs would mean more to him than doing so with the likes of manure, but as always money may get in the way.

I could see Levy paying around 70m to get it done in a year as a nice way to open the new stadium but couldn't see us paying him more than 200k pw, whereas the likes of manure would quite happily double that.

Any chance he has some football romance inside him or would he simply choose the money and the likes of manure?

In our favour of course is what Levy had written into the contract with Madrid, regarding our bid superseding any others I believe. Anyone know exactly how that clause works?

The other issue is Madrid of course possibly not wanting to sell. Despite the on off rumours that he could return to the Prem, the likes of Ballague insist Madrid intend to build their team around him post Ronaldo.

We all acknowledge that we don't really need any additions, apart from perhaps one true superstar player. If we had Bale now, we could win the lot next season. It would have to be the Summer of 2018 or not all, as its obviously not happening this Summer and Summer 2019 onwards he'll be a bit too old to spend 70m plus on imo.

Any chance of this deal or pure fantasy?
 
How did Madrid pay for Bale? All in one lump sum or do they still owe us a load of money? Just a thought....

It's not the fee, it's the wages.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/oct/30/gareth-bale-real-madrid-new-contract-2022

150m over six years. 1/5th (give or take) of the total cost of the *stadium* build. If you also factor in the fee we'd have to pay, we're looking at the utterly impossible prospect of sinking 1/4th of the stadium cost into one guy.

He isn't coming back. And it hurts to say that, because I really do wish he would.
 
Bale is going to Man Utd

He loves Spurs, but Manchester is his next destination.
Does he? Other ex players are quite generous in praising us, but nor him or Luka has said anything positive about Spurs since they left. At least not recently
 
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