What does it mean if Gareth Bale gets benched for the Champions League final?

It is always a sad thing, when a thing of potential beauty is cut off just before it has a chance to blossom. It was all so beautifully poised. This Saturday, Real Madrid would have marched out for the Champions League final, but Gareth Bale — beloved of Florentino Perez, bought for €100 million — would have scuttled off to the substitutes’ bench.

And a thousand transfer rumours would have bloomed.

Bale would have been unhappy, of course. The final’s in his hometown of Cardiff, and what is the point of being a Galáctico if you don’t get to play every game regardless of the little things? Like common sense. Or fitness. Or somebody else being in better form.

Florentino Perez would have been upset, too. Why buy Galácticos if they don’t get played? And, with dutiful inevitability, Manchester United’s negotiating team would have run into the room shouting “We’ll give you £100m! No, £150m! £200m, that’s our final offer!”

But it’s not to be. What is most likely to happen is that Real Madrid will march out, Gareth Bale will scuttle off the substitutes’ bench, and nothing dramatic will follow. Apart form the game, hopefully.

In part, this is because it’s quite obviously the right decision to make. Bale aggravated an injury against Barcelona in April, leaving the pitch after just after half an hour, and ever since he’s been recovering. He may not even be fully fit now. And while his replacement in the starting lineup, Isco, isn’t quite so markedly Galáctic, he’s been excellent.

Isco was voted fans’ player of the year for his part in Real Madrid’s title victory, and has thoroughly reintegrated himself into a club that was trying to get rid of him at the beginning of the season. Though he doesn’t quite have Bale’s capacity for the ludicrous or spectacular, he has the happy knack of making everybody else around him better. So much so, in fact, that if you listen to gossip, Cristiano Ronaldo and other senior players have been asking that the Spaniard start.

But mostly, it’s because Bale is being uncommonly reasonable about the whole thing. Speaking before the game, he thundered:

“I won’t be disappointed if I’m not in the team -- I would be disappointed if I hadn’t made it in time to be at the final. I’ve been working hard to get back in form and have my ankle in good shape. Whether I play the final or not, it’s been a difficult year for the injuries I’ve had.“

He roared:

“It’s going to be a very special day. A final in the city where I was born and we are just one step away from winning the trophy. […] You think about it, and imagine it, but it’s not something which needs to be given a lot of importance. First, we have to play and win.”

And he threw down the following challenge to his competitor:

“He’s a fantastic player and he’s been playing really well over the past few weeks. I’m happy for him and for how he is helping the team during this final part of the season. Whoever makes the team, we will all help each other because the most important thing is that the team wins the final.”

Which is, if we’re being honest, not how the game is played. There’s a long summer stretching out ahead of us, and there’s an entire internet to be filled with content. And nobody ever filled the internet by being reasonable, maintaining their perspective, and refusing to kick off about any slight, real or imagined.

We can only hope that Isco has a nightmare, and Bale is seen laughing, or Bale comes on and scores a hat-trick, then reveals a t-shirt printed with LOL printed across his rival’s face. Otherwise, we’ll have to make to do with some less Galáctic transfer sagas, and Manchester United’s negotiators … well, they’ll almost certainly give it a shot anyway. At least they can be relied on.