Thursday 10 November 2016 09:04, UK
Gareth Bale "deserves every penny" he gets, says Wales' Joe Ledley, but the forward still gets hammered for his "Tarzan" haircut.
Real Madrid handed Bale a lucrative new five-and-a-half year contract last week to keep him at the Bernabeu until 2022, having signed him from Tottenham for a then-world record fee of £85.3m in 2013.
Bale has returned to Wales duty this week with Chris Coleman's side hoping to continue their unbeaten start to the World Cup Qualifiers against Serbia on Saturday, live on Sky Sports 1.
Despite the pay gap between Bale and the rest of his international team-mates, Ledley insists Wales' talisman still gets the same treatment as everyone else in the dressing room.
"He deserves every penny and whatever he gets in life," Ledley told reporters. "He's proven to be one of the greatest players on this planet. There is no jealousy whatsoever. We have known Gareth since he was a boy at Southampton and I haven't seen any change in him at all - that is brilliant on his behalf.
"People can change in football and go different ways but he has just stayed on that straight and narrow line and remained the same person.
"He's just one of the boys - we don't care who he is, we will still hammer him and he will hammer us. That's the banter we have here. If you ask him, he loves meeting up with Wales and that is the togetherness we have in this squad. It doesn't matter who anybody is. We are all together as a team and you can't treat anybody different to anybody else. We are all equal."
Bale was named Wales' Player of the Year for the fourth successive time this week, but Ledley says the squad have been jibing at him for his 'man bun'.
"We saw that [when his bun collapsed and his hair fell down], we had him a bit for that. He looked like Tarzan," Ledley joked.
"There's a lot of banter going on around the place. We play golf together and, if he duffs one, then we are on his back because he's pretty good at golf. That's depressing, actually - I don't know what he's not good at."
