The most successful federal captain of the last 35 years of Hungarian football, dr. György Mezey. Origo greets him with the following writing.
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The following story is about the most successful Hungarian football coach of the last 35 years, György Mezey. But I have to start with a detour right away.
He sat at the table of one of the espresso bars in Vác’s pedestrian street for a week. I recognized him immediately from his tanned face and characteristic mustache. There was a checkered booklet in front of him, drawn in it, designed. Lineup, tactics. Now he works for the local NB III team, he was the federal captain of the Hungarian national football team, and after György Mezey he was the closest to Hungary’s national team getting to a world championship in 1998. Then the Yugoslavs came, and during two matches (or rather in a few minutes) they tore the then checkered booklet and beat János Csank’s team with a 12-1 lead.
But this story is not about János Csank now. But about Mezey and the checkered booklet that appears in some circles today as some kind of swear word. According to the members of the circle, the checkered booklet is no longer fashionable, in fact, it is the cause of all football troubles. Because whoever is still planning his life on a checkered booklet, setting up a football team, tactics, is not a coach and not a man. There can only be something Stone Age professional who doesn’t understand the word of the times, who doesn’t write the tactical agenda for the next round on a tablet, who doesn’t sit in front of three laptops, who doesn’t get up and lie with the XG pointers.
In our checkered booklet, between 1984 and 1986, it was all things that one still remembers as a defining sporting experience as a child. This period fell in love with football with a lot of kids at the time. With me too. At the age of 13, on the morning of April 18, 1985, I left for school late because I wanted to listen to the program Sportreggel on Petőfi Radio, which started at 7.37 and lasted until 8.00. The previous night, they played the Austria-Hungary World Cup qualifier in Vienna, in which the Hungarians won 3-0 and made it to the Mexican World Cup. Virtually half of the radio’s sports department traveled to the match in Vienna. István Zoltán Vass, László Török and Dániel Molnár were also there. Listening to this show, it first occurred to me that I wanted to be a sports reporter. Because sports reporters can be there for football jokes, because they can experience a lot of miracles that this era, for example, has given them – and us. This was the Mezey era.
I experienced it as a strange grimace of life that in 2002, on the first football night of my life, I spent a lot of time in Japan with the man this writing is about, celebrating his 80th birthday on this day. Dr. György Mezey (nicknamed the Dottore) traveled to the World Championships 19 years ago as a FIFA Secondary Instructor, and I got there as a radio worker. And how good it would have been if he had sat on the bench in the match of the Hungarian national team, and in the reporter’s position I was yelling after a Hungarian goal, which we will shoot at the goal of the current opponent in this world championship.
However, fate did not give him, me, or anyone else this opportunity. So far, Lajos Détári’s goal scored for Canada is the last Hungarian World Cup hit, to this day Hungary-France (0-3) is the last World Cup match we could play, and György Mezey is the last captain to lead our country’s team in a world championship. . It’s been 35 years, and as the situation stands now, it won’t change in 2022 either. Thus, it can be said that in 2026 (then the next world championship after the World Cup in Qatar) will be the 40th anniversary of the last Hungarian World Cup participation.
I could write about all the matches of the Mezey era by heart. I wouldn’t have to flip through the old newspapers, because I watched the goal of each match a thousand times on the video shares, I could describe or tell by heart how Jenő Knézy commented on Lajos Détári’s goal with an amazing, backward trick in Austro-Hungarian or what Zoltán Novotny said -s after defeating the radio. And yes, I also know what Folk Sports wrote after the horrible 0-6 against the Soviets, and Capable Sports, and the many books that came out after the Mexican World Cup, in which colleagues at the time, and of course football, lived so wonderfully. , a public writer who repeatedly rammed the sport into the mud also tried to decipher what we cannot decipher to this day.
What happened to the team and the federal captain who played football between 1984 and 1986 that is still remembered with trembling to this day. Even if, according to today, it is already rancid, like rotten walnuts, it is not modern, because its foundations were drawn in a checkered booklet, and by the way, who remembers this, because then not only the booklet but the ball was checkered – or at least not like in 21st century space football.
At the age of 14, one does not know much about the world, but I already guessed at that time that György Mezey should have been told in all circumstances to continue his work at the head of the national team. But the popular anger surrounding the Mexican failure and the atmosphere created by the press pushed the captain into such unimaginable depths that he did not stop at Kuwait. It was inconceivable that the man who was by far Hungary’s most popular personality in March 1986 was trying to forget in the distant country at the end of the same year that Hungary had ever been the federal captain. Those who came after him did not prove to be redeemers, neither Imre Komora, József Verebes, also popular and called Mágus, nor József Garami, nor László Bálint could achieve any results. In the spring of 1988, we got to the point where Austria won 4-0 against Hungary in a friendly match in Budapest. The former MLSZ president, György Szepesi of the radio, later told me that he was abroad and that it was difficult to establish contact with the radio that evening. His first question was, what was the result of the match? When he heard 0-4, he called back twice and then hung up without a word. I later learned that this was the moment when Spiš said, “Mezey must be brought back to Captain.”
The plan succeeded, the doctor returned. The country celebrated because by then everyone had forgiven everything, because by then everyone just wanted us to be there at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, as we were there in 1978, 1982 and 1986.
Because it can’t be that we shouldn’t be there, and anyway, Mezey is sitting on the bench again, so there’s no question. In the group were the Spaniards, the Irish, the Northern Irish and Malta, the first two went on, there was no debate as to how we, along with the Spaniards, would make it to the World Cup in Italy.
The first World Cup qualifier took place on 19 October 1988 in Budapest against Northern Ireland. As the match approached, the atmosphere intensified, which is why everyone was shocked by the fact that only 18,000 Hungarian fans visited the People’s Stadium. But those who have been there – including the writer of these lines – will never forget this match. The minutes passed quickly, there were only 8 left, the score was still 0-0 when Mezey György sent István Vincze to the field. Three minutes later, István Vincze took the ball from the middle to the left, then from 21 meters he shot flat crosswise into the lower left corner. The Northern Irish goalkeeper followed the movement of the ball, but in vain he could not reach it.
One hundred times, I have seen this goal a thousand times since. And the captain, George Mezey, half-smiled on the bench. He did it. He also admitted that he had sent Vincze to the field as his last hope, and he himself would not have thought that Pilu would pay. The next day he told Népsport that: (I quote literally) “We can have a better team than in front of Mexico!” headed.
We did not know that at that time the investigators of the ORFK and BRFK had already filled thick checkered booklets with important investigative materials of the new Hungarian fur scandal, we could not guess that the next World Cup qualifier, Malta-Hungary on December 11, 1988 (2-2) It is not Dr. Mezey, but the police that puts the Hungarian national team together for the meeting, because the fur coat sweeps everything and everyone. After the 2-2 Maltese draw (which was an incomprehensible result at the time), György Mezey resigned again and never became federal captain again. From then on, only Zoltán Péter’s fantastic goal against the West Germans appeared in the pages of the memoirs, Kiprich’s two wonderful hits in Vienna, Détári’s and Esterházy’s hits in Rotterdam’s Dutch-Hungarian.
In the 1990-91 season, he won championship gold with the Budapest Honvéd, and from then on he did not take up much coaching work. The checkered booklets were already dusted on the shelf or in a box in an attic. The ski resort was reserved for the 2010-11 season by the then 70-year-old Master. This season he sat on the low bench of Videoton and, under his leadership, won the gold medal in NB I for the first time in the history of the team in Székesfehérvár. This did not work for Vidin even when he beat Europe in the UEFA Cup in the 1984-85 season – it was connected to the first Mezey era in Vidi-story time and space. Perhaps the most memorable story of the late Vidi-gold was when the team from Fehérvár beat Ferencváros 5-0 on Üllői út. All of this may have been an answer to those modern-day narrators who said that Mezey would never be able to do anything again because he only had checkered booklets, and that wasn’t worth anything. But that gold medal didn’t bring any reassurance either, and Mezey left Videoton at the end of the season. At the age of 70, he showed once again, for the last time, the checkered booklet was finally closed.
I don’t deny, to this day, I’m in close contact with the Master, who was the Origo football European Championship expert this summer. Today I can say: Every sentence of Mezey, all his vision was perfect, be it English, Italian or German, or French. The Qatari World Cup is coming next year, I can only hope that he will take it, and he can even send me his writings on a checkered booklet, I just put it in my laptop and then in the newspaper somehow.
The most successful Hungarian federal captain of the last 35 years has turned 80 years old. May God live and keep us strong and healthy for a long time!
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