Real Madrid star Gareth Bale should start Champions League final… he’s the greatest British player in 30 years and would walk into Liverpool’s team

GARETH BALE might not start in the Champions League final but there really should not be any serious debate.

Bale is the greatest British footballer of the past 30 years. Hands down. No contest.

Should Real Madrid defeat Liverpool in Kiev, Bale will earn a fourth European Cup in five seasons.

He is also one of only two British players to have won the PFA Player of the Year award twice – despite having left the Premier League aged 23.

And at Euro 2016, he inspired a Wales team which featured several Championship players to go further at a major tournament than England have managed in the previous two decades.

Those are the bald facts. Then consider the sheer electricity of Bale at his best.

The way he fizzed and crackled for Spurs in his final season at White Hart Lane to earn what was a world-record £80million move to the Bernabeu.

Or the extraordinary winner Bale scored against Barcelona in the 2014 Copa Del Rey final – collecting the ball near the halfway line and burning his way into touch to kill a Barca defender for pace, before he cut inside to score.

Then, of course, there is the idea that British footballers are too insular and unadventurous to move abroad. Or if they do go overseas, they rarely do themselves justice and tend not to stay long.

Yet Bale has graced the richest club in the world for five seasons now and he has no desire to move back to Britain this summer – despite a difficult relationship with his boss Zinedine Zidane.

And we are talking about a kid who was painfully shy while coming through the ranks at Spurs.

We are also talking about a one-time left-back who failed to feature in a single victory in his first TWENTY-FOUR Premier League appearances.

With a quiet determination, Bale has become the perfect role model for a new generation of British players who know they may struggle for game-time in the Premier League.

English teenagers Jadon Sancho and Ademola Lookman are enjoying success at major Bundesliga clubs, spreading their own personal and professional horizons in a way that can only benefit the national set-up.

And it is Bale, more than any other player, who has debunked the widely-held belief among continental sporting directors that British players should be avoided because they simply don’t travel well.

Yes, Bale’s fitness has been an issue over the past couple of seasons but his recent form has been outstanding – five goals in four games have made it difficult for Zidane to leave him on the bench for the big one.

However hot Liverpool’s front three of Mo Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane have been, Bale would surely still walk into their team – or any other English side.

Not that Bale intends to put that theory to the test.

He believes he belongs at Real Madrid and if he goes, they’ll have to drag him out kicking and screaming.

ALEKSANDAR MITROVIC has powered Fulham towards Wembley with 12 goals since his arrival on loan from Newcastle on January deadline day.

Yet there have been some sniffy comments, mainly from Rafa Benitez loyalists, suggesting that the Serbian striker has simply ‘found his level’ in the second tier.

They are wrong. Mitrovic is an outstanding old-fashioned centre-forward who will be banging in goals and bullying defenders in the Premier League next season, whether Fulham make it or not.

JUDGING by the words of several players who spoke to the media at St George’s Park this week, England’s World Cup squad appear to be fallen victims to some sort of brain-washing exercise.

Harry Kane, Jack Butland and Ruben Loftus-Cheek were all singing from the same relentlessly upbeat hymn sheet – having seemingly been hypnotised into bullishly claiming that England can win the World Cup.

Sure, we don’t want them traipsing into Russia like a bunch of Eeyores but there is a happy medium.

Yes, there have been times in the past when the English media have gone overboard with our tub-thumping (though not for at least a decade).

But just to put it on the record - the media definitely didn’t start it this time. It was the players.

Or at least whichever psychiatrist/hypnotist/lobotomist came up with this ploy.

THE worst possible news for Arsenal’s new manager Unai Emery was Mauricio Pochettino signing a new contract at Tottenham.

Pochettino’s apparent restlessness made Spurs look like the obvious candidates to drop out of the top four next season. But with the Argentine on board, it is difficult to imagine Arsenal - or indeed Chelsea - dislodging Spurs, let alone Liverpool or either Manchester club.

ANYONE who’s sat through one of Manuel Pellegrini’s tumbleweed press conferences will deduce that West Ham’s board have decided their club has been in the papers far too much of late - and that they’re looking for a lower profile by appointing the unquotable Chilean snooze merchant as their manager.

SO the NFL are to fine teams whose players ‘take the knee’ during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.

Ah the good old Land of the Free - where they won’t clamp down on gun ownership however many of their children are massacred at school, but they’ll hammer the evil practice of kneeling down during a song.

Do we really want this lot taking over Wembley Stadium for half the year?