On Ronaldo's return, Bale steals the show for Real Madrid once again

Of course, all eyes were on Cristiano Ronaldo. The Portuguese forward’s recovery from a thigh injury has been the subject of blanket media coverage over the last fortnight in Madrid. Every training ground stretch, sprint and shimmy has been forensically analysed. The odd gorgeous chip, too.

And why not? Real Madrid had arrived at a crucial juncture in this season, the second leg of its Champions League semi-final against Manchester City. Nobody could doubt Ronaldo’s importance to Madrid's cause. His 16 goals in the competition were seven more than any other player had managed this season. They represented 62 percent of Madrid’s total haul.

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But would it surprise you to know that Ronaldo has not been his team’s most efficient goalscorer in La Liga this season? In fact, he’s not even among the top two. Ronaldo leads Madrid with 31 league strikes, but that is in part a function of playing more games than any of his team-mates.

On average, he has found the net once for every 98.7 minutes that he has spent on the pitch in La Liga. Karim Benzema has done so once every 79.5 minutes, and Gareth Bale once every 87.4.

None of this is to disparage Ronaldo, nor to suggest that he is anything less than the most important individual in the Madrid team. Rather, it is to highlight quite how ludicrous it would be to define Los Blancos as a one-man band. Ronaldo has carried them at times in Europe, and perhaps most notably in the quarter-final comeback against Wolfsburg, but it was only a matter of time before somebody else took their turn.

On Wednesday night, that somebody was Bale.

The strike that decided this tie will officially go down as a Fernando own goal, but it was the Welshman who forced it, timing his run ahead of the City player to receive a pass from Dani Carvajal before driving the ball towards the back post. His delivery deflected in off the Brazilian but even if it had not, there is every chance Ronaldo or Jese would have prodded it home instead.

Some will call this a moment of redemption for Bale. Twelve months ago, he was made into a scapegoat for Madrid’s semi-final defeat to Juventus in this same competition. After he failed to score with any of his 10 shots across two legs against the Italians, more than one British newspaper defined him as "Gareth Fail."

Just days before the second leg of that semi-final, Bale’s agent, Jonathan Barnett, had protested that his client was not getting enough passes from his team-mates. Claims of a locker room rift began to build momentum. Bale had been whistled by fans at the Bernabeu, and his slow progress in learning Spanish was held up as further proof of his failure to integrate.

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It all added up to a compelling tale of a player struggling to fit in. But this narrative could never really stand up to scrutiny. The jeers from Madrid fans had been hugely overblown - neither incessant, nor unanimous, as Sid Lowe noted in The Guardian, "at the stadium where they whistled Alfredo Di Stefano and where they whistled Zinedine Zidane."

Barnett’s claims, meanwhile, were supported by bald statistics. Madrid’s players really were passing Bale the ball less than they could have done, though this probably had less to do with any intra-squad divisions than a sense of tactical confusion as Carlo Ancelotti struggled to find the right shape for his team late in his tenure.

On that front, things have changed for the better. Notwithstanding a mid-season managerial change, Bale has looked more comfortable with his role this season. He has played through the middle under Rafa Benitez and then out on the right flank under Zidane, but in both instances been granted greater freedom than he had last season to roam and seek out the spaces where he believes he can best influence a match.

The impact of these changes can be seen in Bale’s improved strike rate. It is also true that his Spanish is improving, and he gave his first interview in the language at the start of this campaign. But we should be just as cautious of the sweeping narrative today as at the corresponding point last season. Because when it comes down to it, Bale was never really struggling that badly in the first place.

Only in Madrid could a season like the one that he had last year - with 13 goals and nine assists in 31 league games - be described as disappointing. Only in Madrid could anyone pretend that the jury is still out on a player who won the Champions League, European Super Cup, World Club Cup and Copa del Rey in 2014 - either scoring or providing an assist in the final of every one of those competitions.

Even the most determined pessimist, though, would have a hard time downplaying his contribution over the past fortnight. Bale scored twice as his team recovered from two goals down to win away to Rayo Vallecano, and then grabbed the only goal of the game in Saturday’s triumph at Real Sociedad.

No player did more to keep Madrid’s season on track during Ronaldo’s absence. And not even the return of the three-time Ballon d’Or winner could overshadow him on Wednesday night.