Zinedine Zidane has confirmed that Gareth Bale has a new calf muscle strain and is a doubt for Sunday’s La Liga game at home to Espanyol as well as Wales’ crucial upcoming World Cup qualifiers.
“[Bale] has a strain, nothing important,” Zidane said. “But here we do not like to take risks if a player has something small. We will see if Gareth is with us tomorrow.”
“[Gareth] will go with his country if he has to go with his country,” Zidane said when asked if Bale would join up with Wales next week. “There is no problem between Madrid and [Wales]. It depends on his fitness, nothing else. We will go day by day.”
Zidane also denied that the hard-to-please Santiago Bernabeu crowd was affecting his team’s performances.
“We would love to play all our games here at the Bernabeu,” he said. “It’s true we dropped points in La Liga, but tomorrow we have a chance to change things.
“We know that although we have the best players that does not mean we win every game by three or four goals. We must prove ourselves again every day — that is what I like about this job, and my players too. They want to show, after some bad results, that we are capable of changing this.”
Zidane was asked about Cristiano Ronaldo reportedly seeking a new contract with an annual salary to match the €30 million net earned by Neymar at Paris Saint-Germain.
“Cristiano is the same as always, most interested about playing games and scoring goals,” Zidane said. “I am not getting into this [about contracts]. That is between the club and Cristiano. There will be no problems between them.”
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