Turns out the guy who had scored 608 goals at more than 25 a year every year for more than a decade was quite good. There were plenty of players missing when La Liga returned from the international break this weekend, but not him.
He, it seems, is inevitable. And so when they had finished, there he was, quietly standing above them all. Robert Lewandowski, the Polish Ian Rush and the Spanish Pichichi.
And, who knows, perhaps something more: he, after all, has just taken his team to a place they hadn’t been in two and a half years.
This was the weekend the Williams brothers kept rolling, Nico and Inaki returning home from debuts with different countries to set each other up as Athletic scored four for the third time to go top of the everyone else league.