Dutiful half-back was the key to 6:3 triumph in 1953 – and the first of the team to die
Remember, remember the 25th of November. Around this time every year, especially but not exclusively in Hungary, focus falls on the seminal game at Wembley that changed football forever.
The 6-3 demolition of hosts England by a side referred to at home as the Golden Team, and elsewhere as the Mighty or Magic Magyars, took place on a foggy autumnal afternoon in 1953. The Hungarians came from behind the Iron Curtain to play the past masters off the park, only to lose the World Cup final eight months later in Switzerland.
The Wembley triumph, however, gained the epithet of the Match of the Century. Generating many books, at least two films, a vast mural in downtown Budapest and a namesake bar once run by hat-trick hero, Nándor Hidegkuti, 6:3 is forever etched into the national psyche. Even today, November 25, a new Puskás Museum is opening in the original Népstadion tower of the contemporary Puskás Aréna, Hungary’s national stadium.
Around the world, if anyone can name one Hungarian, it’s the star of the Golden Team, Ferenc Puskás. Football lovers delving a little further can probably recall his closest friend, József Bozsik, the all-in-black goalkeeper Gyula Grosics and the later Barcelona star Sándor Kocsis.
Few outside Hungary might suggest – or can even pronounce – József Zakariás. And yet ‘Zaki’ was vital to the whole revolutionary equation. Sitting in a half-back pairing with midfield creator Bozsik, either in a 3-2-3-2 formation or in the 4-2-4 system that would later sweep Brazil to triumph in 1958, Zakariás was the piano-carrier, as the rhapsodic Hungarians call his role.
Zidane-era France had in Didier Deschamps their water-carrier, Ranieri’s Leicester their defensive midfielder in N’Golo Kanté – the Magyars required Zaki for Puskás and Bozsik to compose their melody. No Zaki, none of his vital interceptions, his precision tackling, his slide-rule short passes, no tune.
The one place in the world where Zakariás is most cherished, with the possible exception of Guinea, is in his native Budafok. A visit to this former wine-growing enclave south-west of Budapest, its slopes overlooking the Danube fast flowing nearby, reveals the reverence in which Zaki is still kept.
Stroll down the carob-strewn streets around the Promontor utca stadium, home of second-tier side and 2023 Hungarian Cup finalists, Budafoki MTE, and you’ll find a bust of this local hero outside the impressive training centre that also carries his name.
If the BMTE team bus is parked outside the ground next door, it will display a portrait of this rather handsome half-back from the 1950s. His profile is used on large banners around the pitch, proclaiming the name of the József Zakariás Foundation recently involved in the convoluted saga of club ownership that put Budafok in the spotlight in 2023, at the same time as the team’s unexpected cup run. A ten-minute walk from the stadium, a narrow sidestreet with grass verges for pavements is called Zakariás József utca.
So who, then, was József Zakariás?
Born in Budafok in 1924, ’Zaki’ grew up in this vineyard-lined village, then separate from Budapest. An excellent Zakariás biography by István Szeidl, Az Aranycsapat Szürke Eminenciása (‘The Éminence Grise of the Golden Team’, B-Humanitas Stúdió, 2002), available secondhand here, provides lovely detail about the player’s bucolic if impoverished upbringing. He learned his football, as every Hungarian did, at what is known as the grund, a patch of ground where pick-up games took place until well after sunset.
The word grund carries with it all kinds of romantic connotations – the nearest English equivalent being jumpers for goalposts – and it stayed with Zakariás his whole life. Even when he had started out as a professional in Budapest, he would still come back to Budafok to play barefoot with his mates. In the early 1960s, his playing career over and all avenues for high-level coaching closed off to him, Zaki took off to Guinea to help develop football from the ground up.
Zakariás embodied the concept of ‘the dutiful game’, taking up a defensive position early on when boys of his age just wanted to score goals. His dedication, poise and positional sense soon got him noticed and at the age of 17, he ran out for Cable Factory SC. Notably, he rejected offers from Szeged and Kispest – where, intriguingly, a young Puskás and Bozsik were rising up the ranks – to sign with Gamma, a factory team based in south Buda.
The electronics firm had been picking up lucrative war-time contracts and could field a football side that had twice finished fourth in Hungary’s top division. By Christmas 1944, however, the plant found itself on the front line, twice changing hands during the six-week siege that destroyed the building.
Zakariás and his teammates emerged from their various cellars and hideaways to find any patch of ground that wasn’t bombed out or strewn with rubble.
We know much about the local conditions from the writings of legendary manager Gusztáv Sebes, the man behind the Golden Team. While tacticians such as Márton Bukovi introduced concepts such as 4-2-4 and the deep-lying centre-forward, Sebes oversaw the development of the national squad, arranging fixtures and bedding in younger players.
By chance, Sebes was coach of Budafok in the club’s immediate post-war season, when Zakariás and co formed their own Budai Barátság (‘Buda Friendship’) team from the ruins of the Gamma Factory. Many speak of Sebes’ reliance on the collective when trying to explain the reasons behind Hungary’s international dominance from 1950 onwards, while others point to their finely honed technique.
What’s often forgotten is their sheer tenacity. Those players who kept the ball rolling in the 1940s would walk for miles across Budapest just for the chance of a game. In his biography, Szeidl describes an away trip during the war in which Zakariás and his colleagues walked the last 11 kilometres to a pitch in Cluj, Transylvania, as their train could go no further.
In one of the earliest internationals in 1945, Zaki’s first experience in the Hungary set-up was with the B team stranded and half-starving in Vienna after the match, requiring six long days to get back to Budapest.
Sebes himself reserves his most purple prose not for Wembley in 1953 but a game involving local Budafok players and their counterparts over the Danube in Csepel in the spring of 1945, nobody quite remembering the simple joys of playing football.
Budai Barátság became MATEOSZ, then Teherfuvar, representing a delivery firm and attracting a promising goalkeeper, Gyula Grosics. In the mornings, while Zaki checked the goods being loaded onto the trucks, the later-nicknamed Black Panther worked in the accounts department.
The team, meanwhile, held their own in Hungary’s top division. Grosics would later describe this as the happiest days of his life.
After the Communist takeover, Zaki was lured by MTK, alongside Nándor Hidegkuti and led by the coaching strategy of Márton Bukovi. Sebes became part of the committee overseeing the national team, whose core members, including Grosics, were part of the Army side Honvéd, formerly Kispest.
From here, the rise of Hungary is well-documented, the Olympic win of 1952, the 3-0 trouncing of Italy in Rome, and then Wembley. The squad would traverse the entire continent by train, Tirana, Sofia, Warsaw, Zakariás doing the cooking for his teammates once they arrived, his gentle humour maintaining morale when Czibor annoyed Puskás once too often.
By now Zaki was Hungary’s reliable lynchpin, the ultimate team player. In the dressing room at Wembley, Sebes stressed to his No.6 his defensive role in front of the back three, allowing Bozsik to roam and create.
Barely 45 seconds had gone when Zakariás played a short pass to Bozsik, who fed Hidegkuti to strike from the edge of the box. 1-0. The No.6 followed this with telepathic interceptions, clean tackles and slide-rule passes. This was the piano-carrier at his peak, 29 years old and a decade or more of first-class football behind him. Puskás duly stole the show and the rest is the misty legend of the Match of the Century.
So thick was the fog was afterwards, in fact, that the Hungarian players abandoned the team bus and staggered, hand in hand, to Wembley Tube station. Fortunately, the team hotel, the Cumberland, was – and remains – right by Marble Arch station. The team celebrated with emigré Hungarians until the early hours.
The sea change back in Budapest was palpable. The Golden Team went from Olympian heroes to superstars. A million people requested tickets for the game with England the following May, shortly before the 1954 World Cup. Hungary won 7-1 and lamented that one goal conceded. Defeat in Switzerland that summer was unthinkable.
Hungary reached the final the hard way, winning a brutal battle against Brazil and an epic 120-minute semi-final against champions Uruguay, each time without the injured Puskás.
Exhausted, facing a West German team with nothing to lose, on a muddy pitch in rainy Berne, the Magyars quickly went 2-0 up. Then Zakariás inexplicably failed to cut out a ball to Max Morlock, whose goal led the German comeback on ten minutes.
Doubt spread through Hungarian ranks, culminating in a historic defeat. After 35 internationals in the cherry red of Hungary, József Zakariás would never wear the shirt again. He was 30 years old.
Zaki played out a last season or so at MTK, ran a wine bar on Király utca in Budapest, did some coaching at Szigetszentmiklós. After his long stint in Guinea in the early 1960s, he returned to his card games and spritzers with his childhood friends in Budafok. Veteran matches with his former Hungary teammates became a popular distraction, taking him across the country.
After one such occasion in Kecskemét, Zakariás succumbed to an embolism possibly picked up in Africa. He passed away at the age of 47 on November 22, 1971, almost exactly 18 years after the triumph at Wembley, the first of the gang to die.
