Bale is “very close to leaving” the club<\/a>\u00a0and that his exit would be “best for everyone”, claiming it was the Welshman’s decision not play in an earlier game against Bayern Munich.<\/p>\nOn Bale’s appearance against Arsenal, the Real coach added, “He played today, he wanted to and he did a good job.<\/p>\n
“He wanted to be with us today; he trained normally and played the match. I make the decisions and he played one half. We’ll have to see what happens. He’s still here with us at this stage.”<\/p>\n
Arsenal took a 2-0 lead through Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang after Real full-back Nacho was sent off in the ninth minute – with Arsenal also reduced to 10 men on 40 minutes when Sokratis was shown a red card.<\/p>\n
Real, who had Eden Hazard in the starting line-up, hit back with goals from Bale and Marco Asensio in the 15 minutes after half-time.<\/p>\n
The Wales international also cleared a Calum Chambers shot off the line, but had a weak effort saved easily by goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez as his side won the shootout 3-2.<\/p>\n
Bale has been linked with a number of clubs over the summer, including a possible move to the Chinese Super League with a reported \u00a31m a week wage.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gareth Bale scored in his first pre-season appearance for Real Madrid, but his future at the club remains in doubt. Bale came off the bench at half-time to net as Real won on penalties after a 2-2 draw with Arsenal in the International Champions Cup. After the game in Maryland, coach Zinedine Zidane said: “He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":3184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43,6409,12],"tags":[285,1736,195,1172,7421,8908,1718,3577,803,10954,3874,2603,8126,12309,6657,11973,8874,5072,196,11259,7333,7419,6348,1254,594,193,163],"class_list":["post-3183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-sports","category-world-news","tag-arsenal","tag-aubameyang","tag-bale","tag-bayern-munich","tag-chinese","tag-coach","tag-eden-hazard","tag-future","tag-goalkeeper","tag-international","tag-lead","tag-maryland","tag-match","tag-men","tag-munich","tag-one","tag-penalties","tag-pierre-emerick-aubameyang","tag-real-madrid","tag-shot","tag-summer","tag-the-game","tag-us","tag-wales","tag-who","tag-zidane","tag-zinedine-zidane"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52100,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions\/52100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}