When the Magical Magyars illuminated Wembley

„The headline in The Times said it all: 'A new conception of football'. England, the inventors of the game, had never seen anything like it.

Hungary's 6-3 destruction of Walter Winterbottom's shell-shocked team at Wembley Stadium on 25 November 1953 was not only a defining moment in English football history but arguably the moment the baton passed from one sporting age to another.

As Ferenc Puskas, Nandor Hidegkuti and Sandor Kocsis passed devastating patterns around a dumbstruck England side, they did so with a style of play never seen before on these shores, dragging their opponents kicking and screaming into a new era.

Nowadays, when barely two years go by without the England national team suffering some kind of catastrophic defeat, it is hard to imagine a time when the country that gave the world the game still considered itself football's best practitioners.

Unbeaten at Wembley against countries from outside the British Isles, a record stretching back to 1863, England went into the friendly with Hungary 57 years ago expected to win handsomely despite the absence of the brilliant forward Tom Finney.”