The crowd had been in such a state of cliff-hanging excitement that they’d probably forgotten the advertisements in the programme for Wembley’s forthcoming attractions. England’s next opponents at the ground in one month’s time were to be the Olympic gold medallists, Hungary. They figured modestly on the page of events on offer. At the top was an ice hockey match between Wembley Lions and Harringay Racers in the Empire Pool (seat prices from half a crown to twelve and sixpence); next, tournaments of amateur boxing and ‘indoor lawn tennis’. The Hungary game – for 25th November, kick-off 2.15 p.m. – was then mentioned, but in far less space than the ad for the imminent start of the year’s pantomime season. Understandable, really, since as a spectacle it would surely not rate with ‘Humpty Dumpty on Ice’.
On the day itself, the programme notes did anticipate a significant contest. At the Helsinki Olympics the year before, the Hungarians had beaten Yugoslavia 1–0 in the final. They were, of course, among the communist countries making a mockery of what should have been the thoroughly amateur Olympics. Their players claimed to have jobs outside football. Hungary’s captain, Ferenc Puskas, was an army officer, the ‘galloping major’. He would be marked in one of the day’s crucial battles by England’s captain and ‘human dynamo’ Billy Wright. Centre-forward Nandor Hidegkuti and goalkeeper Gyula Grosics were ‘clerical workers’. Centre-half Jozsef Bozsik was to set a Wembley record as ‘the first Member of Parliament ever to play in an International match upon the famous pitch’. He was member for one of the Budapest constituencies, whatever that meant in a totalitarian state. No one was fooled. They were full-time footballers.
Their beautiful football in Helsinki, said the programme, had made them famous the world over. They were unbeaten in the past two seasons. One note, which had a 1066-and-all-that ring to it, went so far as to say that this was the day ‘England faces perhaps the greatest challenge yet to her island supremacy’. To meet it, Gil Merrick was cast in a classical role; he was Horatius facing the Etruscan hordes across the Tiber: ‘It may well be his duty this afternoon to show that unspectacular anticipation is the best weapon of all to hold a heavily attacked bridge.’
But this was to get things out of proportion. Others had been and gone before this lot, the cherry-shirted Hungarians, all continental short shorts and short passing game. The privilege of writing in the programme on how the match might go was not given this time to any cheeky foreigner but to the football correspondent of the London Evening Standard, Harold Palmer. In a half-century or so, he noted, fourteen foreign international sides had been seen off. Hungary had been among them, losing 6–2 at Highbury in 1936. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been a clever team, Palmer conceded with magnanimity, and they had even been superior in midfield. They’d just lacked that component of seeing things through. Having got so far, they ‘let themselves down by their weakness in front of goal’.
Theirs was a style fairly common to central Europeans. Like their neighbours, Austria, they moved away from their adversaries to find open space and retain possession: ‘they reason that while they hold the ball the opposition can do nothing.’ But they couldn’t run away for ever. Today they would also find conditions not to their liking. Heavy fog had threatened to have the game postponed and the novel concession was being made, in their honour, of using a white ball for the whole game. But they were not accustomed to playing on ‘heavy grounds like ours in mid-season’ and the hard tackling of a team of ‘superior stamina’. They were, in short, about to discover it was a man’s game. There was not so much wrong with our football, the Standard man concluded, as the ‘jaundiced Jeremiahs’ made out. This set of opponents would no doubt come with their schemes and plans. We had no need, however, to worry unduly about tactics. Honesty would triumph above deviousness: ‘The English game is all right.’
Elsewhere, the programme noted the Hungarians’ tactics would differ from the Austrians, but not greatly. Rather than an attacking centre-half they came with a retreating centre-forward, Hidegkuti, the Budapest clerical worker, filed away mischievously in the wrong shirt. It had number 9 on its back, but he ‘usually lays well behind his inside-forwards’. From here he was apt to feed them with through passes, or run through himself on to passes they supplied him. It wasn’t, therefore, that England didn’t know about this. As Palmer had recommended, they chose not to worry unduly about it. In the event, the words of Meisl came back to haunt: faced with unusual methods, England teams were ‘prone to be baffled’.
The England defence retained control of their faculties for all of fifty seconds. In as many years, no foreign team had been able to storm the citadel. A sign that things might be otherwise came with the Hungarians’ first attack. Advancing from behind his midfield line, Hidegkuti collected the ball and hit a hard shot from the penalty area’s edge into the top right corner of Merrick’s net. A ‘stunned hush from the packed Wembley terraces’ greeted it, said a Hungarian report. It took their players several seconds to dance at the sight of the ‘white English ball in the net’. Geoffrey Greene, The Times reporter, also had his eyes on it: ‘it was meant to be a dove of peace. Instead it was the angel of doom’.
Within fifteen minutes the same player had scored twice more, one of them charitably disallowed by the referee. The appearance of a retreat that the deep-lying centre-forward gave, suddenly revealed itself as attack. Not only had the match programme given warning, history had seen it all before. In the last such challenge to England’s ‘island supremacy’, the nifty Normans had pretended to run away, then turned with the home team caught unprepared. First Hastings then, 900 less a few years on, Hidegkuti worked the same trick. The victim was a Harold, now as then. Harry Johnston, the Blackpool centre-half, couldn’t fathom whether to follow Hidegkuti and be caught out of position, or leave him to cause havoc at will. Mind befuddled, he looked through the mist for help, calling out across the pitch to his captain, Billy Wright: ‘What do I do, Billy?’ Wright’s reply was succinct and honest: ‘I don’t know, Harry!’
The score was 4–1 by half-time. In the second half England dug into their reserves of resilience and scored twice. So did Hungary. A combination of their easing up – a lack of ‘superior stamina’, possibly – and a first-rate performance by Merrick, kept the score to 6–3.
At five o’clock, a little over an hour after the end of the game, my dad walked the couple of minutes to Gloucester Road tube from the Natural History Museum, where building works were going on around a new air-conditioning system to fan the dinosaur bones and drawers of dead beetles. The papers were on the streets, the placards and men at the newsstands screaming the match outcome. He had to walk up and down the pavement by Baileys Hotel with the Evening News for a while to take it all in. ‘We thought foreign teams were nothing,’ he said. ‘The big games, the ones you were frightened about, were with the Scots.’ He’d had the chance to see the match but hadn’t taken up the offer for the sake of a lost afternoon at work. He was glad he had. He didn’t want to face the journey home: ‘If I felt like this, I wondered how bad it was for those who were in the stadium?’
As for all internationals, his youngest brother, Bim, was there. In his early twenties he had no worries about missing a half-day’s pay and no regrets that he had. It was an incredible occasion, breathtaking – actually, the very opposite of that. It made you realise how long you’d been holding your breath and didn’t have to any more. You’d felt it coming for so long, that the waiting was the problem. The tension was off. The hordes had finally stormed down from the hills. ‘To those who had seen the shadows of recent years creeping closer and closer, there was perhaps no real surprise,’ said Green of The Times. England must ‘awake to a new future’.
For the Wembley crowd the true shock had been Hidegkuti’s goal in the opening minute. It was one of four in the afternoon hit with such power as to make the dusky continental ‘weak in front of goal’ ghost look more pallid than old Harry Johnston. The second following within a few minutes of Hidegkuti’s initial strike made the spectators realise this was to be no flash in the pan. By the third, they were fully disposed to savour what was served before them.
That goal came after a sharply hit diagonal pass from the wing found Puskas on