November 23rd, 1953: a day forever ingrained in the annals of sporting history.

The day
that the mighty three lions of England played the unstoppable Aranycsapat, Hungarys Golden
Team, which had yet to lose a single game in the preceding three years, winning twenty-four
straight. Advertised as the game of the century even before the opening kickoff, this match
pitted the abating creator vs the flourishing innovator and wholly lived up to the hysteria.
Despite having just lost a single international match at home in their entire history,
England were far from invincible, recently losing in both Europe and Brazil. Yet this awesome
form of the Hungarians appears to have been masked by an overwhelming nostalgia of the time
when England was the epicenter of world football, a dangerous sentiment exacerbated by an
ethnocentric policy of footballing isolationism in which England refused to take part in any
World Cup until 1950 with the conceited mindset that they were simply so vastly superior to the
rest of the world that actually beating them was not even necessary. However, unbeknownst to
the English, this attitude was about to be turned on its head and their sanctuary of ignorance
broken beyond repair.
The whistle sounded, the ball rolled into play, and the game began. The superiority of the
Hungarians was immediately apparent with a slick passing move leading to an opening for the
deep-lying striker, Nndor Hidegkuti, who took the chance excellently and scored. Forty five
seconds in and England were already down 1-0. Yet despite a series of chances that could have
easily seen Hungary score several more and England appearing completely lost at times,
misplacing easy passes away from any pressure and generally struggling to control the ball, they
managed to equalize through Jackie Sewell, who finished off a fine counter-attack with a
pinpoint finish into the bottom corner. This did not appear to even faze the Hungarians who soon
responded with another Hidegkuti goal, immediately followed by a spectacular finish by Puskas,

pulling the ball away from the tackle of the defender with his rights before smashing it into the
back of the net with his legendary left. Puskas then added another seven minutes later, the
incredible talent and tactics of the Golden Team on full display and England looked like they did
not even know what just hit them, as commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme remarked before the
game, everybody was telling me that it was a lot of ballyhoo about these Hungarians, England
would win. Well, here we are, 27 minutes gone, 4-1 down. The cracks had begun to show in the
previously impenetrable footballing temple of Wembley Stadium with sixty-three minutes left for
all of England to watch crumble, barring an improbable comeback.
No such comeback was to be had and each side added two goals apiece before the end of
the match. While England was indeed quite respectable at times, the score line does not begin to
do justice to the enormity of the gulf between the two sides. Both technically and tactically
England simply could not compete. The formation they stuck to was the classic W-M, essentially
a 3-2-2-3, with three fullbacks, two halfbacks, two inside forwards, two wingers, and a striker.
Within this system the focus was on strength, efficiency, and individuality. The Hungarians on
the other hand employed the novel M-M or 4-2-4 formation with the striker dropping back into
midfield much like an attacking midfielder in modern football. This system emphasized fluidity
and cohesion in both attack and defense and was taken to a new level by the technical genius of
the players.
England was clearly at a loss in coping with this new and foreign system. Even
Wolstenholme seemed absolutely perplexed at the fact that players where freely interchanging
positions. By far one of the most difficult aspects for England to adapt to was how to mark the
unconventional striker Hidegkuti, usually handled by the fullbacks, but now far from their
natural territory, as Wilson notes if he followed him, it left a hole between the two fullbacks; if

he sat off him, Hidegkuti was able to drift around unchallenged, dictating the play (90). Overall
this massive defeat sent shockwaves through all of English football, yet they clearly did not learn
their lesson, at least not right away, and were once again humbled 7-1 by Hungary in Budapest.
However, for all their brilliance the Aranycsapat were far from perfect with their fluidity
often leaving them exposed at the back and ultimately lacking a World Cup. While this game had
immense implications in the footballing world and signaled the end of Englands self-proclaimed
supremacy, in many ways it was far more than an international friendly. It was a battle of
ideologies and identities, capitalism vs communism, the occupied vs the empire. The Hungarian
coach Sebes was a devout socialist and as Wilson points out the triumph of Hungarys interplay
of the team over the dissociated individuality of England, was a victory for socialism (91).
One could even go so far as to say that such a remarkable success against a political and
economic superpower gave new impetus to the Hungarians to rise up against their oppressors, as
seen in the virtuous yet unsuccessful revolution against Soviet rule in 1956.

Works Cited:
Wilson, Johnathan. 2013. The hungarian connection. In Inverting the pyramid: The history of
soccer tactics., 87-93.