Hungary

Explanation later…

Update

I added the above while at work. As such there was no time to comment, but it was placed in response to a fascinating posting on the Guardian website. The subject is Hungarian football, and what’s gone wrong with it.

For those of you who don’t know, Hungary once had the best team in the world. At this point in time England thought that they as inventors of the game still had this position sewn up, despite a fair bit of evidence to the contrary. In 1953 Hungary visited England, and the feeling at home was that while the Hungarians certainly had a fair team, they’d be no match for our boys at Wembley. Well so much for that. Nandor Hidegkuti and Ferenc Puskas sliced England to bits and Hungary won 6-3. It could’ve been a lot worse too, but Hungary missed a boatload of chances.

Fair enough, thought England, these things happen. We’ve been taught a lesson but we’ll show them. So England visited Budapest in 1954, and promptly got spanked 7-1. Hmmm.

In that year Hungary were red hot favourites to win the World Cup, but suffered from a key injury (Ferenc Puskas) and a dodgy pitch (in the final, which negated some of their verve), and lost to West Germany in that final. The 3-2 scoreline is all the more remarkable given that Hungary had scored twice very early on, and that they had beaten the Germans 8-3 in the group stage. This, however, had been a shadow German side, and the final was a different proposition.  The Germans won the World Cup and the Hungarians would have to be content with knowing that they had once been damn good.  There would be no trophy to prove it.

From then on things got slowly worse for Hungary, which is where the linked article comes in and where my chart does too. The idea is to show that since the mighty peak of the late 40s and early 50s the team has been gradually declining with each passing generation, and is now at a fairly low ebb. The line represents points per game, with three points for a win. So a team winning every game would average 3. Hungary was up around 2.5 in the late 40s, which is remarkable.
So that’s what the graph’s for.

The unheard music

Another quiet day for football, unless Chelsea and Barcelona floats your boat. Actually, it should float my boat, but I’m getting a bit overkilled on all this football (yea, really) and a break must be taken. And anyway, I want to watch an Italian team.

Others are writing though. Nick the Swede has a thoughtful piece on the increasingly maligned Liam Rosenior. I agree with Nick… but… there’s something not quite there with the young right-back. Nick points out that Rosenior completes the same number of passes as anyone else, which is fair enough, but still something doesn’t quite add up. It could be that Rosenior is more inclined to producing Disaster Passes, passes that are so bad that everyone watching frowns, scratches their chin, and wonders aloud “did a professional footballer really do that?” It could also be that this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: we now think “Rosenior can’t pass”, and as soon as he misplaces one we all say to ourselves “see, there it is again, Rosenior and his poor distribution”.

I suspect that the truth is buried somewhere in the above, but remain unconvinced that he’s anything other than a reasonably effective right-back who might look a better player than he really is at the moment. Full-back is a position associated with reliability and efficiency, and Liam’s not there yet (note ‘yet’: he clearly has bags of potential). However, I am frequently wrong about these things and would be delighted to see him take his game to the next level.