Cristiano Ronaldo put his hands on his hips and took a long, lingering look up at the Vicente Calderón. He stood there for a while, alone, striking a challenging pose, chest out and steady in front of the south stand. Beyond the netting, a barrier for flying objects, thousands of Atlético Madrid fans raised their middle fingers and their voices. Others just looked stunned. In the middle somewhere, one of them puffed on a cigarette. So this is how it ends. An hour and a half earlier, a huge banner had engulfed them all: a father and son heading into a stadium whose days are numbered –183 to go – with the slogan “our legacy will be eternal.” They were right; it will. So will his.

The last Madrid derby before Atlético move to La Peineta, near the airport out the other side of the city, opened with fireworks lighting up the side street between Alexander Dumas Road and Melancholics’ Way; with president Enrique Cerezo handing over a silver Calderón to Florentino Pérez; with that banner; and with the club anthem, music down so fans could belt out a first line soon to be taken from them and more meaningful for it: “I’m going to the Manzanares, to the Vicente Calderón stadium.” It closed with Chendo, the former full-back now Madrid’s delegate, carrying the ball to the bus. Another for the collection. With Ronaldo standing before them having just scored the 44th hat-trick of his career and maybe the least expected, to complete a 3-0 victory.

On Sunday morning, AS recalled how the day the Calderón was opened in 1966 supporters held a banner declaring: “We’re at home now and no one has humiliated us. They have to stand; we’re all seated.” The next time Madrid played at home, the response read: “If you want to emulate what Madrid have achieved, don’t stand: you’re better off sitting down. It’s going to be a long wait.” Mostly they were right, especially this century. Madrid had just won their sixth European Cup; fifty years on, Atlético still seek their first. This was Madrid’s 28th derby win at the Calderón; Atlético have nine. For a long time, fatalism gripped this place, a crushing inevitability. Things had changed, though. Enough for this to be unexpected.

“There was a time when they were better than us, now we’re on a par,” Diego Simeone said last week. He resuscitated a derby that was dead. In the 20 derbies before he arrived, Atlético had lost 16 and won none. In the 20 since, the record read: seven wins, six draws, seven defeats. Recently, it looked even better. Atlético had lost just one in ten. Admittedly, on either side of that run were two cruel European Cup final losses, the second described by their manager as “like a death”, but still. Madrid hadn’t won any of the last six league games between the two teams. The last time they met, Atlético won 1-0 at the Bernabéu. As for Ronaldo, he’d not scored in six against Atlético: no team had resisted him for as long.

It didn’t seem the most likely night for him to score three more goals. He renewed his contract a fortnight ago, the new deal running until he is 36. He said it would be his penultimate deal; he would sign another one day and carry on to 41. For many, that was cause for concern more than celebration. Not just the second deal, but the first. Could he really last that long? Could he last much longer? He was already changing at 31. Some dared suggest he was finished. On Saturday night Marcelo responded: “those people want to watch this game back.” When Ronaldo stepped up to take a first-half free-kick, it was the 34th shot he had taken against Jan Oblak since he last scored – not including the penalty at the end of the shoot-out in Milan. The 33rd, a header not long before, had been stopped on the line. Now, the wall opened, the ball hit Stefan Savic on the hip, and the 34th went in. His 35th was saved after a sharp turn. His 36th and 37th both ended up in the net too, taking him to 18 derby goals and so beyond Alfredo Di Stéfano, gone before Atlético reached the Calderón. He has scored 374 goals in 361 games for Madrid. That’s more than Di Stéfano too.

The second came from a penalty, celebrated squatting, a hand on his chin and an “hmmm” on his face as he looked down the camera. The third came six minutes later from Gareth Bale’s pass. So, there he stood looking up at the stand, the lasting image of the last game here. Defiant, not to be defeated. Marca chose the first picture, AS the second. Both chose the same verb. “Cristiano says: I rule here!” And: “Madrid rule like this.”

Ronaldo’s evolution is a reality. He is shifting: not deeper as often happens to players later in their careers, but further forward. He dominates less than he did; he rarely runs 50 yards, bombing up the wing and flying inside to finish; even his finishing has failed him at times this season, the frustration growing. Injuries and fatigue have been a part of the final months of the last few seasons. But he is relentless. In his first campaign in Spain, he scored 33 and since then he has gone over 50 a season, every season, for six years: 54, 60, 55, 51, 61, 51. He has ten goals this season now and, on eight in the league, is joint-top scorer. His sphere of influence may be smaller, but the efficiency remains. He might not always be considered a striker but there are few strikers like him.

Real Madrid’s head coach, Zinedine Zidane. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP

He has just scored a hat-trick, after all. And against Atlético Madrid. You know, Atlético Madrid: the team whose goals-against chart looks like a page of binary code. No one looks after themselves like Ronaldo and he has had the intelligence to evolve too. It is natural to envisage problems and time is inescapable, but it was tempting to conclude there was another glimpse here of the future, of the team evolving with him, of a career prolonged. For the optimists, especially. In the absence of Álvaro Morata and with Karim Benzema just coming back from injury, Ronaldo played as a No9, his natural evolution reflected in his actual position. It is a position he has resisted before but one Zinedine Zidane said that he had enjoyed – even if, asked if this was a definitive change, he said simply: “no.”

Other games may be different, other stages certainly will be, but it worked here. Pretty much everything did, not just Ronaldo. This felt like a victory that had a tactical explanation, even if Zidane didn’t want to explain things tactically. Madrid shifted from 4-3-3 to a 4-4-1-1 in which all the pieces felt like they were in the right place: Ronaldo up front, Lucas Vázquez on the right, Bale on the left, and Isco just behind the striker. His natural role, Zidane admitted. But it’s not just that i is a position that Isco rarely gets to play in; it is that it is a position that doesn’t normally exist. Here, it did – and he was superb. Behind him, Mateo Kovacic was too. As was Vázquez. Rafa Benítez was quickly forgotten, but those two are his legacy.

Zidane’s legacy was this victory, and more. He was the winner here; he’d read it right. As the media put it, he’d got his doctorate. Some of the excitement might have been exaggerated – “colossal,” it was called, an “exhibition” – and the scoreline might have been too, but it was understandable. “Not many teams will win here,” Madrid’s manager said. Well, quite. Still less 3-0. Atlético had gone 22 games unbeaten at the Calderón, all the way back to Barcelona’s visit more than a year ago. Yes, they had lost their last game, but you have to go back 1,683 days to the last time they were beaten two games in a row.

Nor was it just the score, it was the sensations too: while their unbeaten run had already been impressive, Madrid had not always convinced; at the Calderón they did. If it felt like they still needed a performance under Zidane, and most agreed that they did, they got it.

So often outnumbered in the middle, red-and-white shirts occupying the space either side of Madrid’s middle three and behind Madrid’s front three when it came to the derby, this time Madrid had presence there. “The battle in the middle is important,” Zidane admitted,only to back away from that explanation, preferring to talk intensity instead, as he always does, and claiming that his team had done what they always try to do. They hadn’t – far from it – and how different this felt stood out as much as the score. Winning had become a habit, sure, but it was one many thought would end here – the bookmakers had Atlético as favourites.

“Three up front, two, four ... the numbers don’t matter,” Zidane said. But the numbers do matter. 29 games without a defeat, 24 in the league, 15

points gained on Barcelona and Atlético since March; a better record after 32 games in charge than anyone, including Pep Guardiola or Luis Enrique. Zidane’s side have not been beaten in the league since February. When they last met Atlético. That night, Antoine Griezmann scored the only goal, a lesson in the way they played leaving Zidane exposed, leaving them all exposed. Fans waved hankies and chanted for the president to go. Ronaldo insisted: “the stats don’t lie: if everyone had been at my level, maybe we’d be top.” Zidane lamented players’ passivity and admitted: “Maybe next year they’ll have to change things; maybe they’ll have to change the manager.”

Things changed. Unbeaten in 29, 24 in the league, Madrid now sit top of the table, four points above Barcelona, nine ahead of Atlético. That night when Zidane began his press conference by saying: “It’s over.” In fact, it was just beginning. On Saturday night, 260 days and one European Cup later, 50 years of Madrid derbies ended at the Calderón with another win for Real Madrid and one last look from Ronaldo.

Talking points and results

• Carlos Kameni did what Kameni does: against Barcelona, at least. Bandage on his leg, he still flew through the air to make an astonishing save in the dying minutes as Barcelona failed to find a way through against Málaga. Which is pretty much the way it is: no one had kept a clean sheet against them at the Camp Nou, since he had, 32 games and 637 days earlier. “I didn’t expect them to drop so deep,” Luis Enrique said, which begs the question: “why not?”. “Not playing like this would have been suicide,” Juande Ramos said. There was another factor too: Luis Suárez and Leo Messi were both out. But Gerard Piqué insisted, “there is no excuse: our budget is huge, big enough to have won this game.” They spent almost £128m (150m euros) on players to increase their squad depth in the summer. None of them have scored yet. Paco Alcácer managed to go over half an hour without even touching the ball here. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. “Operation leadership”, said the front of Mundo Deportivo. “Up for the leadership,” said Sport. It was all supposed to fall into place. Instead, by the end of the day they were further behind then before.

• In the 94th minute, Juankar was sent off for telling the ref: “blow your fucking whistle, will you?” And there we were thinking that it had all been just a horrible misunderstanding: the ref had asked his name, and ...

• Super Mercado! Kameni did what Kameni does and Sevilla did what Sevilla do: 2-1 down with three minutes left, they won 3-2 at Deportivo, Mercado getting the winner in the 93rd. “Football is cruel,” Garitano said. The referee was, anyway: Depor had about as clear a penalty as you could ever wish to see turned down. Florin Andone’s post-match interview summed it up nicely. Eyes rolled, a long pause, and then: “inexplicable”.

• Eibar, quietly getting on with it. No one talks about us, José Mendilibar moans, but it may be better that way.

• “We have to win in any way we can, however we do it, we must win,” Cesare Prandelli said. Valencia didn’t. they drew 1-1 with bottom of the table Granada, and they could have lost too. They were whistled off and there were chants for Peter Lim to go too. “We’ve hit rock bottom,” Enzo Pérez said. “We have psychological problems,” Prandelli added.

• We attacked badly, defended badly, we were terrible,” said Sporting manager Abelardo. “Shit, I’d whistle us too.”

• Michu scored. That is all.



Results: Betis 2-0 Las Palmas, Deportivo 2-3 Sevilla, Barcelona 0-0 Málaga, Eibar 1-0 Celta, Atlético Madrid 0-3 Real Madrid, Alavés 0-1 Espanyol, Valencia 1-1 Granada, Sporting 1-3 Real Sociedad, Athletic 1-0 Villareal. Monday: Leganés-Osasuna