Reviving Honved, preserving Kispest

HUNGARY eyewitness

- Peterjon Cresswell

Right beside Honved's new Bozsik Arena in south Budapest, lifelong fan Istvan Gazso draws an imaginary line. "It was here," he says, delineating the exact space around him, "where the house was". He and his fellow supporters who run the independent club museum should know, for they used satellite imagery to detect the exact location of the long-demolished childhood home of Ferenc Puskas and his best friend Jozsef Bozsik, stars of the legendary Honved side of the 1950s. Many talk about Celtic's triumphant "Lisbon Lions" team of 1967 being born within 30 miles of the stadium - at Honved, it's measured in metres.

As Gazso explains during a later tour of the Kispest Football House three tram stops away, nine first-team players, Puskas included, and six reserves grew up in a block of 32 flats. They were all from the surrounding community of Kispest, whose namesake team was commandeered by the army ("honved') under the Communist restructuring of sport in 1949. While most call the club Honved, for locals it's still Kispest. Able to press gang the best players in the country, Honved provided most of the Hungary XI that famously thrashed England 6-3 in 1953.

Typified by the cunning Puskas drag-back to outwit the English defence, Hungary played a different game that day, one that enabled them to later beat the same once-feared opponent 7-1 in Budapest. "They were football's first real superstars," says Gazso. "Honved played club games at bigger stadiums, at Ferencvaros and the Nepstadion. They were no longer in Kispest" Pretty soon, Puskas was no longer in Hungary, staying abroad during the 1956 Uprising while Bozsik went home. While the "Galloping Major" found glory at Real Madrid, Bozsik was a hero in his own backyard behind the Iron Curtain.