Hungary
In part the lack of awareness was precisely because the Magic Magyars seemed to come out of nowhere, albeit that football was first played in the country in 1897. But it was also because, although others were myopic, they were not. They recognised both their history and reality, openly giving thanks to the man who they saw as the one who, with the style of play he coached in Budapest forty years earlier, had set them on the path to greatness. It is also remarkable that they did it having just taught the country of that man's birth a footballing lesson.
The country was England. Scotland would be in receipt of the same lesson very soon after. The venue was Wembley. The date was 25th November 1953 in front of 105,000 spectators, a crowd that included the man, to whom the victors would give homage but who had remained in his homeland largely unrecognised. The style was based on the one he had employed so successfully in coaching Austria two decades earlier, one that he had learned two and half decades earlier still from mainly Scots, including R.C. Hamilton, Robert Cumming Hamilton, essentially the die from which the mould was cast. The man in the crowd was James "Jimmy" Hogan .......