Gareth Bale celebrates after netting on his debut, but Madrid Worried

Of the potential points of interest this weekend, the Villarreal versus Real Madrid game was an obvious place to look for what used to be called "journalistic interest." Nowadays that means making sure you're not doing anything else at 22:00 on a Saturday night, finding a bar that has the game on (or invest in Canal Plus), not killing your interest levels by watching any other interesting football immediately prior to that chosen game (such as Barcelona versus Sevilla, for example), and managing to get over the weekly emotional experience of watching your son play a few hours earlier and receive his first yellow card of the campaign.

As for Bale, Marca's Sunday morning cover page predictably featured the Welshman's post-goal frolic, but accompanied it with the headline "Bale, y punto" (Bale and a point) whose literal meaning disguises the word play, since "punto" is a Spanish way of saying "and that's about all, folks." It represented an unusual piece of honesty by the paper, whose normal role is to keep up Madridista appearances, manipulate the makeover, and make a funeral sound like an orgy. In this particular instance, the paper's spin doctors preferred to leave any adjective-fest for some later date.