Bale plays it down. 'It wasn’t a case of letting me go,’ he says, 'it was giving me a bit more time than the others to show what I could do.’ When he returned to full fitness, he made the cut. Moving to Southampton and into a house with the other 'scholars’, he shared a room during the 2005/6 season with another football prodigy, Theo Walcott, now of Arsenal. They remain good friends. 'I think he came to the club at under-11s or under-12s so we knew each other from then,’ Bale says. 'All the boys living in that house had a lot in common. I’ve made a lot of friends out of it. But you can imagine what having 12 to 14 boys in a house would be like. Everybody was playing pranks on each other.’