Cristiano Ronaldo back in Madrid looking to break Atletico hearts once again

When Cristiano Ronaldo lived in Madrid, over the nine years when his match-winning gifts and goal scoring would climb to surreally high peaks, home was a short drive from the raucous headquarters of his local rivals. Atletico Madrid played for most of that period at the atmospheric but ageing Vicente Calderon arena. There were times when its roars of celebration sounded loud enough to carry to Ronaldo’s modern mansion, a few miles to the west.

Between 2009, when Ronaldo joined Real Madrid from Manchester United, and 2018, when he left Real for Juventus, Ronaldo was a close witness to the remarkable rebuilding of Atletico from a neurotic, fragile mid-table outfit who seemed never to win local derbies into regular European trophy-chasers and close-equals to their city neighbours.

But above all, he was the player who thwarted Atletico most regularly. “He’s done us a lot of damage in the past,” noted the Atletico striker Angel Correa, ahead of Wednesday's return of Ronaldo to the Spanish capital, his 36th career contest with Atletico, but his first in the jersey of United.

Those 36 games are almost the equivalent of a full domestic season spent locking horns with Atletico, sometimes at the creaking, seething Calderon, most often at the Bernabeu and more recently in Turin or at the Metropolitano, Atletico’s relatively new home and venue for the first leg of the last-16 Champions League tie against United.

It’s hard to pick out a particularly special venue for Ronaldo from those: His capacity to break Atletico hearts has extended everywhere.

Not least to Lisbon, site of the 2014 European Cup final, when for the first time in the competition’s history, the trophy came down to a Madrid derby duel.

Atletico led for 54 minutes of