He surfed, snowboarded, climbed mountains and skied so well that at the age of nine he was runner-up in Spain’s national cross country championships but what Aritz Aduriz most wanted to do was to play football. It didn’t matter that he spent more time at the local frontón than the football stadium – he’d go to watch Basque pelota but says he can only remember visiting Real Sociedad’s Atotxa ground once – or that he had no real idols to emulate, no posters pinned on his walls and no games on television at home, he loved playing. His parents, happier halfway up a hill, didn’t much like football and didn’t want him to play but he wasn’t backing down. “I’m stubborn,” he admits.

Stubborn is one word for it, and it may help explain how the striker who has represented the Spanish national team only once, playing 15 minutes against Lithuania in 2010, has prompted the nation to demand a return so loudly, so unanimously, that even Vicente Del Bosque can no longer ignore it: “We don’t pick the team via a popular vote but when everyone says ‘Aduriz, Aduriz, Aduriz’ we have something to think about,” the Spain coach admits, “and we won’t act like we’re smarter than everyone else.” It may explain too how the man who twice left Athletic Club because they thought they didn’t need him became their most important player and walked off to a standing ovation on Wednesday night having just scored his 30th goal of the season.

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At the age of 35.

There were 13 minutes left when Aduriz was withdrawn. At his age, you might have thought he was being rested but he was not: he had just racked up his 3,565th minute of a season that started back before anyone else’s, meaning that he has played more than any of Athletic’s outfield players apart from Óscar de Marcos. No, this wasn’t about protection; this was about praise. As he headed towards the touchline, San Mamés rose to applaud him off, chanting his name. When he left the stadium an hour or so later, he was holding the match ball, signed by his team-mates. Asked about it, he replied: “I should sign a ball for all of them, really.”

Athletic had beaten Deportivo de La Coruña 4-1 and Aduriz had scored a hat-trick, becoming only the sixth La Liga player to do so beyond his 35th birthday. It was his third hat-trick of the season, edging Athletic to within a point of a European position, and it brought up his 30th goal in all competitions: 17 in the league, seven in the Europa League, two in the Copa del Rey and four in the Spanish Super Cup. With 30 goals, Luis Suárez is the only player in Spain who has more; not even Leo Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo have surpassed him. And as for the 17 in the league, only one player of his age has ever reached that total in an entire season, and that was Ferenc Puskas.

Puskas admitted that when he arrived at Madrid he was “fat”. As his team-mate Amancio Amaro puts it: “That bugger played pregnant.” He also played in only a five metre space but, Amancio recalls, they let him “because those five metres were golden”. Physically, he was on the way down but football was different then and besides the talent never left him and nor did the goals. Aduriz is not the same. But nor is his the typical case of a player clinging to his talent by looking after himself better than ever before, although he does. His case is different, curious. Benjamin Button. It’s not that Aduriz’s still doing it; it is that he’s now doing it.

Aduriz was always good but never this good. “Age is just a number,” he says, and his numbers actually get better with age. When he joined Athletic for a third time in the summer of 2012, he arrived having scored seven league goals for Valencia the previous season. The season before that, he’d got 10. His totals at Mallorca, where he had been before Valencia, were 12 and 11. And, before that, in the two and a half seasons of his previous spell at Athletic he had scored nine, six and six. He got six and 14 with Valladolid in the Second Division, and 16 with Burgos in 2003-04 but that was in the regionalised Second Division B. In Athletic’s youth team, he had never gone over eight league goals a season.

He was 31, supposedly on the way down. In fact, he was on the way up. Instead of dropping off, or even staying where he was, his stats shot upwards. His league totals since his return read: 14, 16, 18 and 17, so far. In all competitions his run goes: 18, 18, 26 and 30 … with at least 13 games to go. To put it another way: up to the age of 31, Aduriz averaged 0.29 goals a game and since his 31st birthday, he has averaged over 0.55 goals a game.

“I have never seen this, ever,” his manager, Ernesto Valverde, said on Wednesday night. “Usually you think: ‘He’s 35, he has to drop at same stage,’ but you look at him and you just don’t want the league to finish ever. He’s incredible. I have never seen this in an outfield player. I have run out of adjectives for him.” Del Bosque described him as “an exceptional case, unique”. He’s been so good that when Roberto Soldado was asked recently if he thought he had a chance of getting into the national team, he responded: “Saying that is a lack of respect to Aduriz.” His team-mate Iker Muniain jokes: “Aduriz must take some magic potion or something.”

He’s taken his time, that’s for sure. Aduriz had to negotiate with his parents to let him play football, first joining in the fortnightly games played on La Concha bay in San Sebastián when the sea finally retreats enough to leave room for a dozen or so pitches, lines marked in the sand and goalposts carried there from their storage in small huts. He played for local team Antiguoko alongside Mikel Arteta, Andoni Iraola and the Alonso brothers, Xabi and Mikel. And then he joined Second Division B club Aurrerá de Vitoria in 1999. He played 25 games that season and didn’t score once but the following year, he joined Athletic’s youth team playing at the same level, and so his relationship with the club started.

That relationship hasn’t always been the way he would have liked it; twice he left, unwillingly. Jupp Heynckes gave him his debut in 2002 but the German’s departure brought his too, after 54 first-team minutes. He returned in 2005, via Burgos and Valladolid, one headline describing him as the player who would “head up a revolution”, but Athletic sold him in 2008, leaving him practically in tears. They needed the money, which they never got – Mallorca, in administration, didn’t pay – and Joaquín Caparrós thought he was covered with Fernando Llorente and Ion Vélez anyway. Aduriz went to Valencia from there; Vélez is at Mirandés now, having scored three league goals for Athletic between 2007-11 and fewer than 20 since then, across Hércules, Numancia, Girona, Alavés and Mirandés.

Twice Aduriz left but twice he returned. This time, in 2012, he came to stay. He’d missed them while he was away and he had missed a lot. Opportunities had passed him by, seemingly never to return. Three times a cup semi-finalist, in his absence they had reached two finals and been in the Europa League final too. Aduriz hadn’t picked up a medal in a 13-year career, and few expected him to now. At 31, he signed a three-year contract and that, most thought, would be that. Not him: back for a third time, he was determined to make an impact at his club.

“People say goals are innate but that’s debatable,” Aduriz said. “In football, like in life, I think you’re learning continuously. I was always a late developer.” His return has proven him right. Physically, he is as strong and quick as he has ever been, maybe stronger and quicker, and he was still enjoying football. “He lives the game so intensely that age is no handicap,” Unai Emery, his coach at Valencia, told El Correo. His enthusiasm now may be greater, in fact. Even that tinge of regret that this chance came later than he’d have liked doesn’t diminish it, instead increasing the determination to hold on to the moment, to extend it: “There is no secret. I like training every morning. I’ll only leave football when I no longer enjoy it.”

Time brings awareness and Aduriz looks after himself better than ever, his appreciation of what he has enhanced, while the competitiveness is still intact. Everyone likes him – “There’s no pretension about him,” his Mallorca manager Gregorio Manzano said – but team-mates admit that he is transformed on the pitch. “If he’s angry it’s best not to go anywhere near him,” Juan Mata says.

Del Bosque calls him “the prototype of what a striker should be”, which makes the manager’s refusal to call him up so far even more baffling, even as he outscored Diego Costa, Paco Alcácer and Álvaro Morata put together. Now, by Del Bosque’s own admission, it seems he can resist no more. He also has something different to the others. Xavi Hernández always described him as the best header he’d seen, even though he’s not 6ft. Asked in one interview how he hangs in the air, Aduriz replied: “I imagine gravity works the same for me as for anyone else,” but his timing is impeccable and he admits that playing in the Second Division B in the Basque Country, where the ball is rarely on the floor, might have helped. Almost a third of his career goals have come with his head.

But it’s not only in the air and it’s not only the goals: his movement is good, his touch impeccable, he has provided eight assists this season and everything goes through him. €2.5m might have looked a lot for a 31-year-old but bringing Aduriz back is surely the best deal Athletic have done this century. “We play for him; he conditions everything we do,” Valverde says. When the player’s contract was renewed, extending it to 2017 when he will be 36, it was not out of some sense of loyalty; it was out of need. A post-Aduriz future is worrying; it’s a good job he is doing so much to postpone it. It’s certainly not imminent.

The night Athletic reached the Copa del Rey final last season with Aduriz having scored in the semi-finals, quarter-finals and the last 16, it was suggested to Mikel Rico that should they win it, someone should build a statue of Aduriz at San Mamés. “Give me the spatula and I’ll build it myself,” he replied. Athletic lost the final but then they beat Barcelona in the Super Cup at the start of this season, becoming the only team to have taken any of the past six trophies from Luis Enrique’s side and sending thousands pouring into the streets to celebrate. It was Athletic’s first trophy in 31 years and Aduriz scored a hat-trick that day. On Wednesday night he scored another.

Talking points

• The runs continue. Well, most of them do. Real Sociedad were beaten, which hadn’t happened much of late, but most sides kept on keeping on. “We’re a really shit team and we’re going head-first into the second division if we carry on like this,” said Lacen after Getafe were hammered 4-0 at Las Palmas, taking them to seven consecutive defeats. Deportivo were all over the place – wide open and especially vulnerable to the pass in between the centre-back and the left-back – at San Mamés. They lost 4-1 and if the score could have been worse, the run is about as bad as it gets: that’s 11 without a win now. As for Sevilla, they’ve won 15 in a row at home but bafflingly still haven’t won away. And Villarreal’s 0-0 draw underlines their slight shift towards a more defensive, clearly counterattacking style and means they’re now unbeaten in 14.

• Speaking of which, Barcelona have gone 34 unbeaten and are one away from a new league record. On Thursday night they travel to Rayo, who are on an eight-match unbeaten run.

• “I’m not asking you to save all the shots that are going in but don’t put in the shots that are not.” It was Alfredo Di Stéfano who supposedly said that. This week, Carlos Kameni did just that as Málaga lost 2-1 to Valencia. He leapt up to reach a cross, leaned back, stuck out an arm and quite surreally slapped the ball into the net. He protested that he had been fouled as he moved towards the ball and Denis Cheryshev later admitted he had indeed trodden on the goalkeeper’s foot. “Do you think the goal would have happened if you hadn’t?” Cheryshev was asked. “No,” he replied. He may have been right but it still didn’t really excuse the most bizarre– and funniest – own goal.

• “Sometimes it seems like you can’t talk about referees but if they’re bad you should be allowed to say so,” the Málaga midfielder Recio said.

• At half-time of Real Madrid’s visit to Levante, Borja Mayoral approached the ref for a quiet word. “Give the goal to me,” he asked. The referee said he would if he could but by the time he saw the replay he knew he couldn’t. So it was that Mayoral didn’t get the goal on his first start for Real Madrid; his shot, which hit the post and went in off the goalkeeper’s back and leg instead went down as an own goal. He did, though, get another front page from AS, his fourth in six days – albeit this one was shared with Lucas Vázquez and Casemiro. “Youth teamers to the rescue,” it ran. They’d played pretty well in an unusual looking Madrid starting XI but in truth this wasn’t the most impressive of victories – mostly slow and largely directionless – and by the end, Madrid were struggling physically. Four of them went down with cramp.

• “You scored three goals...” the question began. “Four,” Diego Simeone said. “Yes, three plus the one that was disallowed …” “Four,” Simeone said. He wasn’t letting this go. “Four, four…” In the end, it was three and while it might have been more, it was still Atlético’s biggest win at home this season and their joint best win in the league (they won 3-0 at Las Palmas and Sevilla). It was also their 17th clean sheet. It may well have been their best performance too: they played with pace, pressure and precision, cutting la Real apart. And that despite a horrible run of fixtures, time-wise: from Eindhoven to the Bernabeu to a Tuesday night to Valencia at the weekend, where Madrid and Barcelona both dropped points. If there was tiredness, and there surely was, it didn’t show. “We played well but that doesn’t mean it’s right,” Simeone said.

Results

Atlético 3-0 Real Sociedad, Las Palmas 4-0 Getafe, Sevilla 1-0 Eibar, Celta 0-0 Villarreal, Málaga 1-2 Valencia, Athletic 4-1 Deportivo, Levante 1-3 Real Madrid. Thursday: Granada v Sporting, Rayo v Barcelona, Espanyol v Betis.