From Hansen's column in Torygraph:
'The decision by the Real Madrid coach, Jose Camacho, to drop David Beckham on Saturday night must feel to the England captain like the accumulation of weeks and weeks of pressure finally taking its toll. There can be no doubt now that the love affair between this famous Spanish club and their original English golden boy is now over.
'For Beckham it has become a simple battle for his place in one of the most competitive squads in Europe which has become all the more fierce after the disastrous 3-0 defeat to Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League. And at the back of his mind will be the fear that, if his club can drop him from the starting line-up, then there could be a possibility that the same fate might befall him with England.
'There has not been a player in the history of football who has had the kind of profile that Beckham enjoys. It has been a remarkable journey to the forefront of the nation's consciousness over the last eight years. But that kind of positive attention is a very difficult thing to sustain and however much some people will always try to deal with you fairly, the level of the viciousness in the criticism tends to be proportionate to the praise that had come before. Beckham has begun to find out in the last 12 months just how nasty that can get. On a lesser scale, I remember it happening to Kevin Keegan as well when he was the England captain. His performances were judged much less sympathetically, the slightest mistake seized upon. Performances which would have been praised a few years earlier were held up as examples of his decline.
'The same has happened to Beckham. His performances against Ukraine, Austria and Poland were not out of this world but they were not as bad as they have been described in some quarters. But just as he was singled out for extraordinary praise in the past, he is now being singled out for extraordinary criticism. It does have a lot to do with certain agendas in the media, but it is the same media that Beckham has courted in the past.'