Gareth Bale was astonishing in the last six months of 2012/13 and the streets of one corner of north London will never forget.
There are few things more beguiling in football than a largely humdrum team being elevated by the presence of a single other-worldly presence. A player so thoroughly out of step with those lined up alongside and for the most part also those ranged against him that they appear to have been dropped into the game from not just another team or another sport but from another dimension.
Younger readers who know him primarily as an online crank and friend of Farage may be surprised, for instance, to learn that Matt Le Tissier spent a good decade of his younger days doing precisely this for Southampton, scoring goal of the season contenders three times a month for a team otherwise comprising 10 Francis Benalis. But you won’t read about that in the woke mainstream media.
Few players have ever done it better, though, than the now-retired Gareth Bale in his final season at Spurs before making a world-record £85m move to Real Madrid. There he would go on to win five Champions League titles and three La Liga titles, contributing a great deal more to those successes than many give him credit for. A Real Madrid career that included all that silverware, one of the all-time great Champions League final goals and an overall record of 106 goals in 258 appearances must make him one of the most impressive flops ever.
But maybe that’s it. Surrounded by greatness as he was at Real – and in the case of Cristiano Ronaldo pretty much entirely overshadowed by it – he could never quite again be the outrageous obvious star of the show the way he was in the 2012/13 season, dragging the rest of the team along with him.
It’s to his enormous credit that he managed it at all with Madrid, and there were certainly games – Champions League finals among them – where he did. But in that Spurs team it seemed to happen every single week.
Spurs having a player who scored last-minute worldie winners on a weekly basis yet still finishing only fifth is so very Spurs. We’re exaggerating, but only slightly.
We didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight the 2012/13 was not just the Gareth Bale Season at Spurs; it was the one that would lay the foundations for the Mauricio Pochettino Team that was to come. In the summer of 2012 Spurs brought in Hugo Lloris, Mousa Dembele and Jan Vertonghen, the three players who would go on to form the spine of…
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