The Fabulous Three,Best Forward Line in International Football History: Puskas-Kocsis-Hidegkuti
Three icons of the game: Bela Guttman, Sandor Kocsis, Puskas. Legendary Hungarian manager Bela Guttmann is perhaps best remembered as a coach and manager of some the world's leading football teams, including Honved/Kispest, AC Milan, São Paulo, Porto, Benfica and C.A. Peñarol. His greatest success came with Benfica when he guided them to two successive European Champions Cup wins in 1961 and in 1962. He laid the fundamental tenets of the Hungarian 4-2-4 formation in Brazil starting in 1957, that led Brazil to World Cup triumphs in 1958 and 1970. He managed Ferenc Puskas at Kispest in 1948 and Eusebio in Benefica from 1959-1962.
The world will often afford examples of men, who, worthy of veneration and renown, have burst the shackles of mediocrity with a trailing cloud of glory to stand in the world a new order of men; men of the very right stuff promising transcendent moments cheerfully on the make to re-invent their own field of expertise about whom fantasies are conceived.
There is no team that has yielded more and greater patterns of goal-making than Puskas, Kocsis and Hidegkuti, the three pushed their goings earnestly at the head of a astonishingly free, sundry command of attack that was beyond question the greatest goal reckoning side in the history of international football. This is the team which, above all others, had seized the affections of the footballing world in 1952, 1953, 1954 and 1956. They were great moments for Puskas, who offered an abundance of guidance to manage an awesomely prodigal line consisting of strength and powerful plays to clear broad scorelines: stepping out as strong global players with an unerring grasp of football that conquered from the late 1940s to the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.
The collectivist system did much to stamp Gustav Sebes' idea of his team being a design center for a harmonious band of supremely talented footballers. Up front, by braiding together two such devout talents in Puskás and Kocsis, his ultimate meritocrats, whose power lay in swaying the balance of the game in their favor, they became the greatest and redoubtable strike partners of them all whose landmark volume of 158 goals in the international record books put beyond question the position of Puskas and Kocsis as among the consummate craftsmen of the ages. Their momentous, joint and colossal order of 158 goals, a gulf between them and successive tandems gapes so hugely that unlike anything that went before or has come after it would prove everlasting. Theirs was a story of two invincible heroes drawn from the middle and lower classes in their prime who always seemed to tackle the big game, and plunged into it with zeal and stamina to mine the fantastic goal, the team maneuvered through two great personal sagas, one emanating from Puskas and the other from Sandor Kocsis.
The abundant days of Puskas and Kocsis during this period foretold future promise alternating between suggestions of specialness and unique dominance, and were internationally known as uncompromising players of the modern age on a team in which all function precisely as it should. There were few places better to visit than Budapest's
Nepstadion (Nation's Stadium) where audiences readily responded to the greatest in things at the national team and compel us to enjoy the pleasure of being brought to such new football perspective where everything seemed true, gilding dull days with a hearty sense of earthly joys and exciting marvels. The national team, pushed forward by their example and aided by other accomplished players, was seen to move toward a enterprise of a powerfully imposing quality that lost one game over the course of six years and became an all-encompassing vault of vision and athletic mastery between these two great amasser of goals. The entire artistry of Kocsis and the ponderous broadsides and daring speculations of Puskas were inseparable from one another at Honved and at the national level, each with striking qualities of determination and skill, with both finding their identity and fame in the monuments of a very respected history.
These two men, Puskas and Kocsis, two
Midas-type players, amid bright walks of rare imagination, are ever endeavoring to go beyond their predecessors, capable of putting forth unprecedented offense that sinks the great teams, firing mad enthusiasms in capacity crowds, they are making their way upward through football's hierarchy and treading in the steps to the sole fountain of football immortality where awe alone prevails. Great as Puskas and Kocsis are said to be, the national side was far better than it was often assumed because the team, like anything great and elaborate, had an extra content that added considerable starch to better seize every mode of play in advance of their competitors—a remarkable motion man who makes a lot of difference, Nandor Hidegkuti, who helped the team to fame.
Intensively practiced and lighted from within by a common sociability as a team, here Nandor Hidegkuti produces a deft sleight of feet stop-ball maneuver that evades and gets by his marker on a practice field.
In particular at the national level, the greatest contribution of the
Golden Team had been their campaigning of a prototype player that would lead the path to a tactical furthering— the playmaking deep-lying center-forward. In the midst of this highly versatile and amazin
gly powerful model, Sebes unveiled quietly a high value surreptitious centerpiece player that was of such sovereign use for great and far-reaching ends. Of a different mold but similarly influential, Sebes introduces a sharp-witted Nandor Hidegkuti as a deep-lying free trading player behind the inside pairing of Puskás and Kocsis. This something subtle and profound nuance of moving Hidegkuti off the main line put the game on a new course and later into football's lexicon entered the fluid station called ' playmaker ' — akin to a browsing, parsing and personally scoring player who directionalizes flows down field resembling a quarterback in American football. The unease that his created within opposing lines left them disjointed by drawing a natural tendency from defenses to leave him unmarked and operate freely in space un-buffeted by not being truly an advanced player. With event-driven spontaneity, Hidegkuti provided crashing sorties as ball movement dictated to crumble the center goal area and unlocked in the No. 9 position a new autonomous menacing robust character in football operating on the event horizon between midfield and the opposing rearguards and between creator and goalscorer. In Hidegkuti were equally blended the instincts of a roving spirit and disposition of a striker and an attacking midfielder who had many moments of being a rather remarkable player and has, with good reason, been called the
‘father of Total Football’. Hidegkuti was a solid compelling figure, the type at his best, who was content from a vantage point above the line to hover and put in browsing expeditions to score goals, and since he was an astute navigator he frequently could (with 39 goals in 69 appearances). With this partnership of Puskás and Kocsis up front and a self-directing third arrow unpinioned in Hidegkuti the team had now become inestimably enhanced to cannily supply large rhythms of attack that sprang the deep bases of granite-like defenses in front of ever larger number of followers.
What wonderful productions of wit, equal verve and profusion of sportive sallies that makes approaches to footballing perfection was Puskas, Kocsis and Hidegkuti involved on? There was, perhaps, no team, however hardened by deep skill and long training, that was better. As players, they continued to meet the one decisive criterion for greatness, that is prevailing even against the most mountainous competition, battling the era's greatest combination talent to triumph: in classic confrontations against the world's elite (
World's Top #12-ranked) they managed to beat fourteen teams, while drawing three times and lost but once. The rolling offense, a spectacular merger of the three men, that lambent sweet rhyme, that repertoire, seeing their designs with glorious courage lead the charge into "
modern football" was such an accumulation of deeds that the footballing world marveled at their prodigious stream of works. Exploded scorelines were part of their real routine, and they won domination over half of their matches (32 out of 60 games from May 1950 to February 1956 ) by a three goal difference or more. Such is often the end of games that Puskas, Kocsis, and Hidegkuti played in, the
Magical Magyars were sown thick with unquestionable proofs—the three players by October, 1956 stood at the head of their profession with 194 goals between them. By June 1954, it simply appeared that no one could deny them their special destiny.
