Jonathan Wilson - The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Football Shaped the Modern Game

THE NAMES HEARD LONG AGO

Also by Jonathan Wilson

Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football

Sunderland: A Club Transformed

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches

Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thank You

The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper

The Anatomy of Liverpool: A History in Ten Matches

Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

The Anatomy of Manchester United: A History in Ten Matches

The Barcelona Legacy: Guardiola, Mourinho and the Fight For Footballs Soul

JONATHAN WILSON

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For Mam

A NOTE ON NAMES

Many of the cities referred to here have undergone multiple changes of name, or are known by different names in different languages. Where there is a common English name I have used that; otherwise, unless there is good reason not to, I have gone with the name it is currently known by in the country where it is now located, providing the Hungarian alternative in parentheses.

With clubs, unless there is a commonly used English variant e.g., Bayern Munich I have used the local name, so FC Nrnberg are the team from Nuremberg and FC Hannover 96 play in Hanover.

A bright October morning in the Kozma utca cemetery in the east of Budapest. The leaves are copper, the sky clear. A grave-keeper gives us a lift to the plot were looking for, a mile or more back from the road. Nobody comes to this part of the cemetery much any more. The paths are overgrown to the point that this feels like woodland. Branches claw at the sides of the van. We stop, and the grave-keeper points vaguely into the trees. There is a suggestion of a path, but the grass comes to shin height and we have to duck under a fallen branch. Every now and again, a slight raise in the ground or an angular stone hints at what this land is. Eventually, 50 or 60 yards from the main path, we come to a headstone so swathed in ivy that if you werent looking for it you could easily think it was a tree stump. The gravekeeper wrenches the leaves aside. Its not the one were looking for.

Wed asked in the cemetery office and, after a quick search on the computer, been given a number. There was the plot, and then two other numbers: how many rows back and how many rows across the grave was. Even near the gate, that was of limited use because it wasnt clear from which corner the numbering started; out in the woodland, the reference was a hint, nothing more. We were also shown the burial card, a rectangle of ancient brown paper, perhaps three inches by two: Pter Pl Hirschl, died 7 July 1940, buried 9 July 1940. It seemed likely nobody had looked at it for 78 years.

We walked on and came to another headstone, the ivy so thick upon it the branches were half an inch or more in diameter. Impatiently, the grave-keeper tore the ivy away. I saw the PL first, then the PTER. This was it:

Petikm

HIRSCHL PTER PL

LT 14 VET

MEGHALT 1940 JLIUS 7-N

Kisfiam, a viszontltsra!

HIRSCHL IMRN

Sz. BLEIER ERZSBET

18961971

Not just the grave of Pter Hirschl, but also of his mother, Erzsbet, the wife of Imre Hirschl, and the message, added after Pters death at the age of 14: My little son, until I see you again!

To my surprise, I felt a ball of emotion rise in my chest. In part perhaps it was at a life ended so young, and at two lives so thoroughly forgotten, but more than that, I think, it was a selfish feeling, another detail added in uncovering the life of a man who had obsessed me for more than a decade, more confirmation of who he was, that I was chasing somebody who had actually existed which at times, given the way Imre Hirschl seemed always to slither from my grasp, I had almost come to doubt. It was a relatively straightforward matter then, armed with dates of death and burial, to return to the archives to consult Pters death certificate and find cause of death listed as pneumonia and deterioration of the kidneys. Not much, perhaps, but another fact, another tile in the mosaic.

A curtain fell over Hungary in 1945, beyond which few ventured. Hungary is a country that has forgotten a lot of its heroes, but none have been so thoroughly forgotten in part, in his case, it must be admitted, through his own obfuscations as Imre Hirschl. He was a brilliant coach, hugely successful in South America, and yet when he left Hungary in his late twenties, he had never worked in football. He is an extraordinary figure, his life shaped by two world wars, a genius, a charmer and a rogue and yet he is one of roughly a dozen coaches of similar influence and intrigue produced by interwar Hungary.

When does a book begin? People ask how long it took you to write a book and you say a year, or 18 months or four years. From signing the contract to submitting the manuscript for this book took roughly two years but, because I was writing The Barcelona Legacy during that time, there was probably only around 14 months from beginning the research to submission. In reality, though, the book began long before that.

I first went to Budapest in 2004 when researching Behind the Curtain. I arrived by night train from, I think, Belgrade and spent my first hours there huddled in a bakery in Keleti station avoiding the junkies on the concourse and waiting for the sun to rise. But the city soon grew on me. There was something in the faded grandeur, the sense of cultures meeting, that appealed. An old girlfriend once said that I make a decision on whether I like a city or not based on whether I have a good meal in the first 24 hours Im there. Its an observation not entirely without justification and certainly Budapest passes that test: the coffee houses and restaurants are a large part of the appeal.