''The Match of the Century' 

Nov. 25, 1953

     Once every hundred years an athletic spectacle ascends up from the world within and forces itself to be expressed with a specific audience that impresses the mind, stimulates it, focuses certain memories and values, interests and needs, gushing forth a great many judgments and speculations that get tied up with the spectacle.  After the spectacle questions and immediate commentary multiply themselves quickly as journalists and historians try to find the essence that best represents the stellar discovery, setting in motion ideas and feelings to contemplate long after the event itself.  In its most public aspect, the spectacle is useably real even more for its instructive value which for a variety of reasons may have been especially memorable and impressive.  After everything is marvelously taken in, and as it were, savored, the converting spectacle is given public shape and the immediate motive is to best articulate the experience to others and later generations as a historical turning point to something higher.  

     In late 1953 the 'Golden Team' achieved world-wide fame in a game against England in London, a nation that equipped immense teams that inspired half the world in a match that nothing in the annals of football history could outshine.  The result amazed the world and remains one of the peaks in the history of the sport.  After years of fermentation and experimental boldness behind the 'Iron Curtain', finally in 1953 "modern football" burst forth.  This match was arranged that November and would have game-changing implications to prevail upon old insular normative beliefs to re-inspire and drive the frontiers of the game.

     It is this significant game in November more than any other that offered the game new values and football's contemporary era may be said to have begun and first shown in new clarity.  There was hardly a football educator or manager of note who was not deeply influenced by the experience played by the Hungarians as an excellent and eventful one worthy of perpetuation.  The unforgettable match could be the great defining formula of the sport's new era that brings forth a new dispensation and a masterpiece that exacts a long devotion with the game serving a youthful discovery of a wave of the thereafter that vouchsafed a future vision of the game. 
     An enormous creative clash of intrinsic qualities and genuine truths between the era's contemporary masters — the Golden Team and the venerable undefeatable aristocrats of the game was long awaited.  It turned out to be, as yet the most influential friendly ever played that elaborated a lively glorious style as a feat of progress.  The match with England in November 1953 is known to almost everybody in Hungary as ' 6 : 3 '.

     The old British Empire, backed by unsinkable maritime power and profluent colonial trade (that many saw as a basic cause of British greatness) reached to endmost frontiers once a decade before as the planet's most powerful realm with many interests and responsibilities around the world.  After dynamic and strenuous activity wrought by rapid industrialization and a merchant fleet whose size was without parallel that enabled Britain to capture markets around the globe, Britain became the mistress of the seas with a navy that would guard the lanes of commerce and become the world's workshop and from the 1870s on the world's banker.  By the opening years of the 20th Century its glowing aegis comprised more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth to become a world-embracing imperial power.  A late Victorian could look back with astonishment on the celebrations and triumphs of swelling trade and industry during his or her lifetime and Britain was in excelsis. 
      Britain had bravely stood against fascist-occupied Europe throughout the war raised to mythic proportions for their stubborn continual resistance in the early years almost single-handed and stood athwart the political earthquakes by which the old establishments crumbled away in the first half of the century.  Victorious in two of the world's greatest conflicts but not without considerable cost to its realms, the Empire was fading as two new preeminent 'superpowers' in the United States and the Soviet Union re-staged and steered global affairs for the next forty years with a visible inward retreat for Britain encroaching after the war.  Additionally, ensuing years of a de-colonialization process also brought the Empire due notice, the heyday age of New Imperialism as Britain then knew itself decades before was slowly closing in a kind of painful reappraisal of its place in the world. The post-war world was changing and along with it football.

     Through inexhaustible industry, highly competitive genius and thoroughly learned craft, England cut a supreme figure of what many considered the qualities of an ideal team to be and in vigorous participations piled on the triumphs against the worthiest teams of the world who hailed outside the United Kingdom starting at the dawn of the 20th century in 1907.  Even in their away games in sixty-eight competitive matches until November 1953, England averaged 3.69 goals each outing but their superiority showed more clearly in those games played at home that elevated them to a mythic altitude in sports history.  Shielded by unbeatable teams England declared its position as the greatest national side at home adding a dash of luster to the imperial sunset. 
 

Historical Background to the Tactical Evolution

     It will be best to look rapidly at the general evolution of tactics and then to concentrate on the new aspects brought about by the Hungarians of the early 1950s.

     The English had invented the modern game in last half of the 19th century and was the first century of codified football.  Its first laws and rules were patented by a solicitor by trade Ebenezer Cobb Morley and soon grew immensely popular across all spectrums of society due to its simple rules and minimal equipment requirements being globalized as the world's most popular association sport in the last decades of the 19th century and early 20th centuries.  Since the codification of the sport in 1863 in Victorian England the English national team had never suffered defeat on its home shores from foreign opposition from outside the British Isles and their successful tradition had been penultimate and globally decisive.  The old producers of football had turned aside every effort in 90 years to overcome the mightiest team of them all.  In the home of the makers and shakers of the game, the gorgeous, wonderful, victorious English sport that smacked of the English soil and sensibility undefeated since 1066 and possessed an unbeatable quality and romantic neo-imperial Victorian inheritance with a direct unbroken connection to the palmiest days of the British Empire. 

       Before existing systems, football was a leading sporting endeavor that flourished in the ancient world.  During the mid-Victorian era in England, each personality and the roles in which they played on the field had been molded by their upper-class upbringings and the standards of the class into which each was born within the bounds honored by English society.  The prevailing individualist views of the game meant that in England passing was sparsely done in favor of an emphasis that required of players to concentrate accurately on running with extended dribbles as far as one could, first evading and glancing off, then with fresh personal gratifications and spirits spend time crashing into a wide set of opposing players prior to kicking the ball for others to chase when one could proceed no farther, this being repeated endlessly for the duration.  This uncomplicated and straightforward style that did not always make for clarity with its erratic, rough and agitated quality.  
     The game which had its roots in mid-nineteen century England at public schools, before anything, had evolved from the earlier standing affairs of shared understandings among the schoolboys that played the game.  Older boys at most public schools called 'prefects', who mostly originated from wealthier backgrounds and the variously privileged were obliged to keep the school discipline and were responsible for organizing compulsory athletics on the football grounds. They were attended to and served by selected younger boys called 'fags' and, as a consequence, football became the grounds upon where the power relations between prefects and fags were routinely staged and acted out and a setting for cultivating aristocratic virtues.
       It is hardly surprising then that only prefects took an active part as 'attackers' and preoccupied their time assailing a broad line required to defend the goal made up of around two-hundred fags.  This old-boys club who dwelt in the splendor of swinging forward were supposed to show consummate skills in handling the ball, dribbling, balance and individual tilting and swerving runs were lauded as necessary braving for these apostles of lusty individualism.  Prefects did not play with much regard to defending and or even acting together with team-mates on their own side and gave its approval to strength, intelligence and industry in a kind of physical Victorian turbulent delight sport.

     Many inquiring minds who wanted to come terms with the toughly wound action with players in the mass hovering around the ball reasoned that a purified makeup of the game was needed and tried to recast the game to suit better sensibilities.  The reasonableness of their scheme smoothed out the flux and surpassed the fray on the pitch by entering an established set piece formation replete with more order, sequence, and wider spacing among players for reasons of clarity where attack still lay as the lasting core of the game but one that allowed for soundness in defense.  The immediate outcome of this re-organization brought form and being out of the chaos and led to having a five-man forward line, three half-backs (midfielders) and two defenders called fullbacks or the 2-3-5 formation plus the goalkeeper.  In doing so, this apparent choice came to be called the 'pyramid formation' and thought to be the natural way to play and the high point in football's evolution that continued to be used into the first quarter of the following century all around the world.

     Even as late as 1927, the pyramid formation was in common use and played in full swing variously in most countries and it took an act by FIFA in 1925 (The Offsides Rule of 1925) that forever fixed the limits of the game that formalized, as a rule, that only two players, implying the goalkeeper plus another (instead of the usual three) must be behind the opponent and the goal-line for it to be played fairly or 'onside' by the attacker.  However, this new law became increasingly inadequate to the real needs of defenses that were taken by surprise.  Under the new circumstances,1928 marked an unforeseen ascent in scoring, nearly forty-three percent more goals were scored than the previous year had seen. 

      It was now especially easy to score a lot more goals than ever before and managers had their problems and some people worried that declining defenses might fall apart and not reach to full examples of earlier days and necessitated a rethink toward a more elaborately squared composition.  A new approach was incarnated by one gifted maverick manager, Arsenal's Herbert Chapman and precisely because of this inadequacy in defense Chapman's famous 'WM' formation would be a new kind of coping with the Offsides Rule of 1925.

     Chapman's ideas were dominated by two great persistent concerns: to resolve the insufficiency and unevenness that lay in defense and where that would lead.  Much rather, Chapman taught that by withdrawing two of the five forwards deeper with the consequence that they became supporting attacking players and withdrew the center-half back to the point that where he essentially performed the 'stopper role' as the center-back guarding the goalkeeper.  Out of this, Chapman created a quadrangle of four players at the dominant center lanes of the field, trussing his midfield in defense with three full-backs and assigning three scoring forwards in front of them (outside-right, center-forward, outside-left) or commonly described as the 3-2-2-3 formation.  This "WM" formation zoned in modulated balance attained a naturalness with its grand symmetries with its triple poised physique in attack, midfield and defense.      

      This difference laid out the harmony neatly parceled between all areas as none had done previously and meant that football was in a modern handheld in nice balance.   Those wishing to stem the high tide of scores that new law brought about expounded their program.  Widely studied and appraised, the wisdom of the WM formation catalyzed at Arsenal came to be seen as a more natural way to play and eventually began to displace the old pyramid system that provoked a whole new common sense in the late 1920s, 1930s, and the 1940s.  This was the real reason for the move away from the pyramid system with its untidy layout, and the old easily understood formation finally lost its characteristics by the great reform attributed to the far-sighted man at Arsenal.  As a widely consulted tactical shape many viewed the new formation as football's expression in new finished language and the sport's truth lay in union with this new stable doctrine.  Seen overall from above, as it were, the "WM" was a vast balanced structure and with-it Chapman strikes a grand resolving chord.  Born to the classical temper of the times, the tactics of former times had been replaced and ahead soccer is a sport of stately symmetry.

     Elsewhere on the Continent, some who were effective proponents of another type of game, namely in the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire with the Austrians, Hungarians and Czechs still practicing the 'Danubian School' (a varying style of the basic language of the pyramid system where chiefly horizontal passing along the turf was continued and revised).  The different style that soon emerged in England and the one used by the continentals depended on the debate of how, perhaps, the game might lose a part of its beauty, its alluring forward tenor.
     Lászlo Feleki, a local Hungarian journalist and writer, traveled to the home of Arsenal in Highbury and spent months parsing and seeing the new tactics at work.   Meanwhile in Hungary itself, there were separate discussions and arguments with some newspapers reporting benefits that sided with and some against this new system as it continued to gain momentum in fits and starts.  But on the pitch, it fell out of favor especially with those whose task was to score goals, the strikers and it was they who determined what was to be a success.  Some years later in Budapest, English pioneer Arthur Rowe, spent time as a manager in Budapest in 1938 and 1940 and delivered a lecture series on the subject for a far broader and deeper presentation to popularize its appeal.  For Rowe himself, it evidently did not suffice to play the game of an earlier time and for some years the WM formation was an in vogue conventional formation played throughout the land in Hungary.

     In a like manner, it would be in Hungary some twenty years after Chapman's original idea that a celebrated manager called Márton Bukovi then working at MTK was not pleased with the situation with his capable center-forward facing increasing difficulties and complications around the goal area and was someone who wanted to enliven and gin up his attack and to disentangle and redeem a better compassed forward player. 

      The immediate inspiration for the new Hungarian 'MU' formation might be described as an attempt to do for the venerable 'WM' what Chapman had earlier done in 1927 in directly calling upon the plight of defenses in the old pyramid system.

      Bukovi himself had been a part of a fierce competitive struggle with Honvéd across a decade where an exceptionally good Honvéd side with honored names of Puskás, Kocsis, Budai, Czibor, defender Loránt and keeper Grosics already involved won domestic titles in 1949/50, 1950, 1952, 1954, and 1955.  By the time this famous group had arrived, Bukovi was already a more profound and precise thinker than almost anybody in Hungary and assembled a very good team with Hidegkuti, Palotás, Zakariás and Lantos (all future members of the Mighty Magyars) and had previously won top club honors in 1951 and again in 1953 and 1958 and spelled the only real trouble for Honvéd and its domination in the league.

      It was a satisfying and winning time to come with a background from MTK and their coach was used to maneuvering his men into shrewd leaps of fitness and ambiance that worked to direct and focus experience.  Quite aside other clubs, at MTK, to keep impressions aroused and to inculcate new virtues in training matches Bukovi informed his players to try outside their limits to more than ordinarily absorb the experience as resourceful players, sometimes staging attackers playing as defenders or in the opposite to reach the right conditioning in all aspects and came out a talent-plush side that was able to anticipate their rivalry with Honvéd.  Moreover, Bukovi tried to solve the problem of the jostling and the jam by persuading this player named Péter Palotás working alongside Hidegkuti, to scale back from his entangled forward area and marshal his game above the main line and found the new tonic to more lively passing opening with the two forwards striking a rich vein of goals that in real terms shifted the change in the years ahead.  Perhaps this occurred precisely because of the same regimented inflexibility that had tightened the game since its new inauguration after 1927.
      The concept of a free-floating center-forward was not entirely original with national manager Gustáv Sebes but an independent and simultaneous work of Marton Bukovi.  Palotás was a very good player even at national level.  In twenty-two official matches he scored 17 goals and the team did not falter (19 wins, 3 draws and no defeats) who was the first 'deep-seated forward' in history to make his trade pay, but eventually it would be Hidegkuti who would become the internationally lauded veteran specialist by carefully timing his runs with feeling and intuition late into the penalty area to try conclusions or to swing the ball to a better-placed colleague on the trot for them to prosper.  This withdrawn center-forward (or false No. 9) gave Bukovi an auspicious device that allowed him to accommodate Honvéd in their rivalry.  Neither was Sebes concerned with the defense of the past and saw at once the advantages of Bukovi's reliable ideas that led him to derive the famous deep-seated third forward role that MTK had built had from the ground up.

The new 'MU' formation

      Sebes' reply to the 'WM ' was well prepared and developed in time for the Olympics in Helsinki not least because Bukovi sank new thought of how to genuinely spring more vitality into his game.  The new 'MU' formation pinned down by Bukovi and Sebes went altogether in advance of the universal scope of the 4-2-4 system and may be considered the the creative arc between the older and admired tradition of the English 'WM ' and the new setup later in the same decade that created a leading and complete international style.       

    
     But the Hungarians took it one step further.  By abandoning the generally accepted notion of player assignments usually identified by the logical numbering of players' jerseys that described the typical relationship of where they would play on the pitch (at least on paper anyway) they skewed the defensive compass of those teams thought not to cheat in their man-to-man coverage; and by playing out of position every so often they sapped opposing cohering discipline done so not merely to spatially force new lanes but also to fabricate as much confusion and tension that could be aroused as players began to fall into a checkered position as parts of a flexible whole.  There the one always created the preconditions for the other in the lead up to the breakthrough score.
     By coaxing opposing players out of their responsible areas that, in the fullness of time, would build toward a boosting breakthrough moment or a displacement elsewhere they warped accustomed defenses.  This lively appearance was accentuated by many capricious looping jaunts and stunting runs connected to prim passes that were apt and accurate and required intense awareness that accounts in no small measure for leaving defenses struggling to adapt.

    It was with such a team venturing in things unattempted hitherto in style that was first glimpsed at the 1952 Olympics but not entirely known to the outside that the Hungarians went to London in the late autumn of 1953 for a comparatively huge encounter that would later be heralded and become famous for being the most influential and famous prestige friendly in sports history.

     Gustáv Sebes was a learned mind of the game and was determined to succeed as none had before. He minded that the game itself be a vestige of research and preparation that were meticulous to lodge an eternal place in history.  Sebes' powers of observation were a thing of an absolute crystalline order, his attention to small details that were apparently trivial to many peerless.
      Sebes visited London for a match taking place in Wembley for a special day's observance, a very auspicious occasion to celebrate the world's oldest football association, the England FA's ninetieth anniversary.  This match, played on the 21st of October, would see the 'Rest of the World ' against England's finest.  The great itinerant Hungarian player Lászlo Kubala (who lead Catalonian Barcelona to four Spanish national and five Copa del Rey titles) scored the first and fourth goal against England, but in the 92nd minute Alf Ramsey put England on an equal plane with the world's best to shield England's world-sweeping football tradition and long-running epic from the year 1863 and the foreigners were another challenge met and brushed away.

Jacques Ferran, the noted journalist on L’Equipe stated after the draw: “Let us wish that English football does not forget that the only match that matters will take place on November 25.”   Over one hundred journalists and sports reporters were sent from European nations for coverage of the sensationally anticipated 'Match of the Century.' 

        It was during this game that Sebes noticed that even very high balls did not rebound more than a meter above the famous pristinely manicured lawn at Wembley and was likewise reported so thickly dense and pulpy by returning Austrian players (who visited Wembley in 1951) that it would soak up the energy and spring in their step and runs.  With that intuit knowledge of the field's absorbent and fatigue-making nature while running, Sebes and the players got the the idea that the forthcoming game be played with the 'the ball being the fastest player', thus quick passing and not the ball's tending would be something extra as an advantage.  Sebes was given three English balls by FA President Stanley Rous to take home to acclimate the Hungarian players.     

      As a certain extra point in his work, while at Wembley the day after the commemorative match, Sebes drew detailed measurements of the famous Wembley pitch and tried to fathom and gauge the slant of the sun that late afternoon match to be played seven days from December.  Sebes chose a home ground in Budapest that came to replicate Wembley's wide dimensions and drilled the players in match-practice three times a week from there on against opposing sides deliberately fielded in the powerfully successful English 'WM ' formation.     

     Ten days before their appointment in the ancestral home of football in London, Hungary played a good Swedish team in Budapest in a game their supporters could hardly enthuse over and incline the press to optimism heading into the most grandiose match of their lives.  Puskás missed from the penalty spot and hit the post, and where Sweden possessed physically in the match the Hungarians played hastily and sluggishly with the heavier tough match balls specially imported from England by Sebes for the players.  Before long, there were some complaints of the not too pliant balls being ''wooden' and responding unfeelingly to their boots and perhaps inhibiting the edges out of their game.  The Swedes drew level in the 87th minute to earn a 2-2 draw. The unsatisfying result caused some real panic in the Hungarian press and with the longing public and some chided the team.     

      A committee of seven English FA analysts including England manager Walter Winterbottom watched the game from the stands to appraise tactics and strengths Hungary would invoke using were carried away with lukewarm impressions that Hungary was not able to round out a winning finish.  But little was grasped by the best-informed men in the world as Sebes showed nothing new, thus Winterbottom knew neither the formula nor the new forces of the 'MU' formation.  Sebes with the ease of a great master of experiment threw out on the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application.  By neatly obscuring Nándor Hidegkuti, the enigmatic cached figure as-yet-unrevealed ranging between midfield and the forward line decoyed elsewhere and remaining to be deciphered, it made an unlikely lackluster match a solacing success.  Precisely as they hoped to do, the match had the mild fulfillment in that English scouts seemed only modestly aware of the amount of tactical change the Hungarians would take to England and the upshot was it aroused no major prior expectations and Nándor Hidegkuti, the 'withdrawn center-forward', the false No. 9 playmaker had not been fathomed.

     Of all the sports rapporteurs, radio broadcaster György Szepesi had ample opportunity to observe directly the deeds of the Hungarian team since 1945, whose dramatic role was a teller who to set out to record the leading events surrounding the team's affairs following them everywhere, always keeping in mind the need to hold the interest of the listening audience and was embraced as the twelfth man who gave vibrant accounts describing the team's ups and downs for the general public.  By maintaining a classic saving faith, Szepesi was among the first to respond to the underprized genius and the new prospects of the informal 'World Championship Decider' and his intuition weeks before the match with England was convincing.  Szepesi was certain the team would carry and surpass the threshold of new potential. 

      In charge of radio broadcasts as head of the sports desk, in spite of bleak forecasts and alarms by many columnists after the Swedish match, Szepesi knew that better times in football lay ahead than the game played in 1936 where Hungary lost 2-6 at Wembley.  It was he who insisted on scheduling the match in the Radio Times twice the same day three weeks before the match itself, the afternoon live kickoff at 3:15 pm and its re-broadcast at twenty past 8 o'clock, something perhaps he could not have done if he had not understood them perfectly and nobody would have dared to do if the game would be known to lead to a cratering defeat.
     When the Hungarian national team set out to take on England, many journalists and public personalities scoffed at the idea and said they would be better off not trying.  At the time it was considered well-nigh impossible to win in England where playing in Wembley was neither easy nor certain where seldom has excellence reached such sweeping proportions beyond the scope of any team in the world.

     The overall mood and outlook in the United Kingdom in late November in the bellwether year of 1953 was winding down positively, the outcome of the highly publicized match with Hungary would burnish a very memorable year as the country was very prominent in current affairs.  Post-war rationing of many food staples finally comes to an end.  In a revelation earlier in the year, Cambridge scientists announce to the world the landmark discovery of the structure of DNA that would herald in a new era in perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th Century.      

     The most important happening of the year was also the world’s first major international event ever to be broadcast live to millions around the globe.  A new young monarch, Queen Elizabeth II comes to the throne in June amid acclamation that occasions the real advent of global television as a real societal force on the world stage.  In the process, the television age would come of age in Britain and largely shape a British cultural zeitgeist in the years to follow.   The radiance and youth of the queen and the senior wisdom of the level of Prime Minister Winston Churchill was sought by many sentiments to give rise to a new age of poise, serenity and progress that would invoke rank to Britain.  In late May, hale British adventurers with their porters set out for a mountainous physique in Nepal that had daunted the imagination that had claimed the lives of many brave earlier explorers who have gone before.  The conquest of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953, the outpost of a last frontier, reverberated around the world and made headlines to mark one the greatest human feats of the 20th Century.  News of the expedition’s success reached London on the morning of the young queen’s coronation on June 2, 1953—and Britain was on top of the world.  Around this time English football, never humbled at home, renowned in a kind of proud anachronistic insularity remained the best in the world that was ripe with all-filling awe.

     London spoke for Britain in the impeccable southern intonations of the radio announcers of the state-owned BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), and the press in building out the game that lay ahead galvanized worldwide radio and newsprint audiences naming it the "Match of the Century" that gave the game a sort of here-and-now universality in the service of sensation and thus focused the eyes of the Anglo world upon this match.   A visit towards both teams' power rating the media's remark of the match taking on such significance as 'The World Championship Decider' was a becoming view considering the acme strength of both nations who were weighed with very rich results.  England was ranked No. 3 in the world with a power-rating of 2025 points or the No. 2 team in the Old World (the team from Argentina being ranked No. 2 with 2048 points) and Hungary was ranked No. 1 with a rating of 2105 points.

     The anxiously promising match was ever England's sternest challenge to stem a gathering juggernaut from across the Channel from behind the 'Iron Curtain' that had remained unbeaten for over three and a half years — and in deference to a remarkable time-honored tradition and unrivaled power in Europe, England would have its place in the sun again as the highly approved side, stating what has come to be universal opinion, the superiority of England playing at home.  England would be a defender of the central English sport's venerations of the past and their stand against Hungary that November would be a clear fulfillment of the codes in which they have been reared.

     At superior ease in the conventions and the thoroughly learned habits of old concerning the sport, the English public generally felt good about the prospects of facing the Hungarians in Wembley.  Many observers felt English premier experience, high professionalism with the game to be played in the country of football’s birth would bring success with ease against a team from the Socialist Bloc where no commercial interests were allowed in football whose players were technically amateurs from plainer backgrounds most of whom were nominally pressed into soldiery in the Hungarian army.

     For some more in tune with the chief controversy of the time, the expected gamesmanship on the plane of sport would reflect upon the larger struggle and everyday concerns between capitalism and socialism with major differences of political theory fortified within geographical lines with the game assuming political hues and dimensions for many both inside and outside the game, colored by a portraiture of capitalist, Western, imperial grandeur standing to scale against a frozen collectivist communist working-class system from the East, it to be metaphorically played by top athletes.

     England fielded a squad of prestige formed of considerable and legendary power within a time-tested and patently English formation of the 'WM'.  There were some mighty sharp men as public characters in the vaunted English team that was composed of all the stars of Football League First Division whose reputations were of world renown.  Two of whom would be later knighted for exceptional services rendered toward national sport.  These included a first-rate world-class maestro, the ageless wonder Stanley Matthews considered one of the great athletes of the century bronzed with experience and a phenomena of longevity who supplied much aerial and crossing prowess to set up goals where ever he traveled, beaming out his wondrous lines who was entering veneration as one of England's greatest vintage players aged thirty-eight, a much feared powerful center-forward in Stan Mortensen who had scored 22 goals in 24 international appearances, defensive star Harry Johnstone, the Footballer of the Year in 1951, attacker Jackie Sewell, the most expensive player in the land.  Alf Ramsey, who would become England's national coach in its greatest days, played right-back with special spatial awareness and technique.  England's very capable center-half, captain Billy Wright was the Footballer of the Year in 1952.  Billy Wright was a thoroughgoing Englishman and described as a real talent before the war who became the regular captain of England and would go on to be first player in history to reach 100 appearances for a national side for whom there’s current involvement and a modern ongoing campaign to have knighthood conferred posthumously.

         At England's order was a very powerful and salient midfield, a quadrangle of four players with an untiring work rate of fetching and carrying the ball up and down the field whom the Hungarians referred to as 'the piano carriers' packed by typical big, classic characters.

       This highly successful system long wedded to a hardy, open, spontaneous and industrial style with its usually high-quality personnel, united by a wondrous unmistakable English competitive spirit saw England take on all comers outside the British Isles and never have the world's best teams left England victorious.

      England's good foundation in the classic WM system is apparent in their impeccable rightness of form in the autumn of 1953; and at the height of England's footballing career around the post-war era, its team was firmly established in serious opinion as the foremost in Europe not only because of their unsurpassed mastery of that essential pattern but also because it exerted a strong influence on its age.

     Gustáv Sebes had written earlier letters to his long French friends in Paris that his team would stop en route before arriving in London.  The Hungarian team set off with great fanfare showered by a great audience of well-wishers from a Budapest train station that once housed the carriages of the luxuriant and mysterious 'Orient Express' (the fabled Paris-Munich-Vienna-Budapest-Belgrade-Istanbul rail line) from earlier days and arrived in Paris and there played a Renault car factory team, a company Gustáv Sebes had previously worked at in pre-war Paris as a union organizer.  Remarkably a crowd of 15,000 people turned out to see the practice session that gave great warmth with team winning 18 - 0 and receive great ovation at the finish.  Goalkeeper Gyula Grosics and Puskás recalls memories of that game helping assuage fears, weight of expectations and anxieties over facing a great English side that produced consternation in virtually everyone in Europe facing them.

     The Hungarians arrived by boat ashore to England and were excited after gliding past the legendary glistening white cliffs of Dover, England's version of the rock of Gibraltar that they had seen in cinema newsreels and in vintage black-and-while films.  The Hungarians found their comfortable lodging in the Cumberland Hotel in London, and it was an auspicious occasion they found a local Czech restaurant with a Hungarian chef in charge within walking distance where the dietary menu was planned in consultation with the team doctor.  They practiced their skillful trade at QPR's (Queen's Park Rangers) home ground on Loftus Road which had a quaint quiet picaresque countryside and homely feel that allowed for focus.  A ponderous pile of telegrams began to flood and inundate the Cumberland Hotel from all over the world and a suitcase full of these good wishes were taken aboard the coach that ferried them to the game of their lives as talismanic written charms.

     In the four-hour pre-game discussions at the Cumberland Hotel, Gustáv Sebes knew well that the usually so unthwartable English always spoke soundness in defense and could be certain it would convene determination against any foreign team with a myth-making attack that warped and sagged one team after another as visiting sides headed toward collapse by a four-goal difference done by a proud, mighty team that had all the breaks.  Sebes directed that a veering excursion from what he had used against the Italians in Rome in May would make more out of the event, outlining his thoughts in a notebook.  The tone of the tactical talk focused on working out some fantastic stylistic nuances naming it the "Whirl", and the Hungarian players, including the FA President Barcs from the front office who was present noticed a very excited Sebes speechifying exuberantly to season his message with small details.  To re-create one's own magnificent triumph like before in the spring in Rome with that same wealth of detail was no easy task as anyone who had made the attempt will testify.

     The day of the match the Hungarians went by coach to Wembley Empire Stadium and some people aboard eased the palpable tension on the way by starting folk songs and the national anthem to help placate nerves and hoped to labor for a grand day, another uncut try for the top to break the barrier between the game played by the world, namely the continentals and now Hungary and that profound quality the invincible English could play at home. If Sebes stressed the new elements now flourishing on the Continent and upon the quiet dualism seen in Hidegkuti's role, England's assurance resided in their faith of playing the 'WM' style better than anybody in the world that won continuously in the fixed channels of historical tradition.