Roll up, roll up… welcome to the last night of the Gareth Bale show. One of football’s most curious episodes, featuring the Welsh wizard and the world’s most prestigious football club, will draw to an end with this Saturday’s Champions League final.

It could easily be the case that Bale’s Real Madrid swansong is a whole load of nothing.

Carlo Ancelotti could simply leave him out of his matchday squad and Bale won’t even travel to Paris.

They include the extra-time goal in 2014 that put Real ahead for the first time in their final with city rivals Atletico and the astonishing overhead kick he produced against Liverpool in the 2018 showpiece.

They were the good times for Bale at the Bernabeu. More recently it’s been all injuries and insults – with the fans questioning his loyalty – quite a lot of golf and the Spanish media branding him a ‘parasite’.

Bale has played just 290 minutes of football all season – equivalent to just over three whole games – with only seven of those coming in the Champions League.

Ancelotti’s mind He has been sidelined with knee, calf and back injuries, plus a bout of Covid, and has managed only one goal, way back on August 22.

And despite all that, it will occupy Ancelotti’s mind that Bale could potentially be his match-winner against Liverpool at the Stade de France on Saturday night.

The 32-year-old is fit again and training, Ancelotti confirmed as much at the weekend. He was part of the official portrait session on the media day at the Valdebebas training ground last week.

That may be a hint. Bale will love where Real are staying – the five-star Auberge du Jeu de Paume in Chantilly – because it has a top-class 18-hole golf course next to it.

A place among the Real substitutes is the best Bale can hope for having played so infrequently this season but if Liverpool are winning with, say, 20 minutes to go, maybe Ancelotti will summon him in search of a saviour.

The reception he receives from the travelling Real supporters will be interesting. Bale was spared what was likely to have been a chorus of jeers when left out of the squad for Real’s final league game against Real Betis last Friday.

Things soured when he celebrated Wales’s qualification for Euro 2020 by posing with that infamous ‘Wales. Golf. Madrid. In that order’ flag in November 2019. Despite his role in four Champions League triumphs, the perception was that his heart was no longer in it and that Bale was more committed to the country than the club.

This continued earlier this year when Bale missed Real’s 4-0 Clasico defeat to Barcelona with a knock but was fit enough to start – and score twice – as Wales beat Austria four days later to reach a final playoff match for the World Cup.

Marca mocked Bale up as a ‘parasite’ and claimed he was ‘sucking’ money out of Real with his £550,000-a-week wages while giving little in return.