Best, Beckenbauer, Platini, Zidane: Puskas topped them all

Ferenc Puskas was, along with Johan Cruyff, one of the two greatest European footballers of all time.
Jonathan Wilson

How great was Ferenc Puskas? Such things, necessarily, are subjective - and, particularly when you're going on video footage, almost impossible to judge - but for me he stands alongside Johan Cruyff as one of the two greatest European players of all time.

It is not just his technical ability. Other players have had that. It is not even the fact that he had key parts in two of the most celebrated games ever played on British soil - Hungary's 6-3 victory over England at Wembley in 1953 and Real Madrid's 7-3 victory over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960. It is the fact that that ability was allied to a brain that understood how best to use his ability for the team.

That is why his nickname, the 'Galloping Major', was so appropriate - even if he hardly galloped and, at the time it was bestowed, was only a lieutenant - because he was so good at marshalling his side towards a common goal. "If a good player has the ball, he should have the vision to spot three options," the full-back Jeno Buzanszky said. "Puskas always saw at least five."

Team-mates complained about Puskas's influence over coaches and about his constant hectoring on the pitch, but nobody ever accused him of being selfish. Along with everything else, he was a hugely astute leader. In his first season at Real Madrid, for instance, he and the notoriously difficult Alfredo di Stefano were joint leading scorers going into the final match of the season. Late on, Puskas had a chance to score but opted instead to wait and square it for Di Stefano, recognising the problems it could cause for morale if the Argentinian did not finish as top scorer. He showed similar selflessness after that 1960 European Cup final, handing the match ball to Erwin Stein, who had scored two of Eintracht's three goals. Puskas had scored four.

There are those who carp that Puskas was very left-footed. He was, but it hardly diminished him. "You can only kick with one foot at a time," he once said. "Otherwise you fall on your arse." As an example of how his turned a weakness into a strength, you only have to look at that game against England in 1953.

With Hungary leading 2-1, a cross from the left found him at the back post. He took the ball down and it seemed that he had to hit it with his right foot. Billy Wright, England's captain, went flying in to make a challenge, "rushing," as Geoffrey Green put it in the Times, "like a fire-engine going to the wrong fire". Puskas, slipped the ball back with the sole of his left foot, leaving Wright sprawling and, with barely any backlift, thrashed his finish past Gil Merrick. The Hungarian radio commentator Gyorgy Szepesi remembers walking on to the pitch after the game and examining the spot. "They should have laid down a plaque," he said.

Comparisons are made with George Best, not least because Puskas enjoyed a similarly hectic social life. Tales of his drinking exploits with Jim Baxter are legion, and the late Scotland winger, who maintained that the Hungarian had just two words of English - "vhisky" and "jiggy-jig" - often told the story of arriving at a party in Drumchapel on the outskirts of Glasgow to find Puskas "jiggy-jigging" in the scullery.

But Puskas's habit never got in the way of his football and, after the two-year exile he served following his defection in 1956, he had the self-discipline to lose 18kg before lining up for Real Madrid. With an Olympic gold, a World Cup silver, five Hungarian league titles, five Spanish championships and a European Cup, plus the fact he was top scorer in Spain four times, his achievements dwarf those of Best.

The decline of Hungarian football since has only magnified the greatness of Puskas's side. I arrived in Budapest last month, in the week they lost to Malta, and I even heard it said that at least Puskas, suffering then the later stages of Alzheimer's, would not understand.

"His brain is over," said the Olympic water-polo champion Gyorgy Karpati, who visited him regularly. "He is just a body waiting for the day when it will be over." Sentimentally, there were those who wished he would hold on until Saturday week, November 25, the date of the 6-3. Amid all the commemorations of the Uprising, no anniversary will be so soaked in tears as that.

"If I say Hungary, I say Puskas," Karpati went on. "If you go to Venezuela or Naples or Australia and you say Hungary, people would say Puskas. That says it all."

Jonathan Wilson is the author of Behind The Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe

Taken from the Guardian/Observer