Real Madrid have reported that Gareth Bale has returned from Wales with a significant fragment of the Moldovan national anthem stuck in his head.
The 27-year-old played all 90 minutes of Wales’ comfortable 4-0 win over Moldova, but the extent of the problem only became clear after the final whistle.
Concerned teammates gathered around Bale in the dressing room as he hummed several stanzas of Limba Noastra while in obvious discomfort before he was treated by the Wales medical team.
“It’s always distressing to walk into the dressing room and have a teammate tell you to awake from a deathly sleep in a language neither he nor you speak,” Sam Vokes told FourFourTwo.
“By the time Gareth approached the orchestral middle eight he looked in genuine pain.
“It’s worse than that time the Macarena wiped out the entire Arsenal dressing room in the '90s.”
Melodic maelstrom
Real Madrid officials have responded angrily to news of Bale’s incapacitation, questioning whether Wales needed to risk him being swept up in a maelstrom of passionate post-Soviet socio-linguistic nationalistic melodies.
“The good news is that he only seems to have contracted the chorus and small sections of the verses,” a Real Madrid doctor told FourFourTwo.
“But this is the worst nightmare of any big club for one of our players to have been exposed to a rugged, bruising Eastern European anthem and to return clearly mesmerised by its confused cultural call to arms.
“We all know that teams like Moldova will try and unsettle bigger nations with their trumpet-lead bombast and to be honest we’re dreading what Mozart’s Bundeshymn could do to him next month.”
Ray Parlour, who played for Arsenal in 1993, commented to FourFourTwo: “Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Macarena... Oh God, please kill me now.”
Please note: This satirical news story is not real. But you knew that, obviously.
