Imagine the following:
a soccer game, when Hungary played with England and won 6:3. There is a man who fall asleep and goes back to the 50’s, when the game took place. He knows that Hungary will win, but nobody believe him. He follows the game at different places: at a pub, at the barber, at a store and so on. You must know that Hungary was occupied by the Russians under the 50’s, and everybody was afraid. When this man appears, people begin to wonder who he can be. The police will take him. Some people starts to follow him. He gets to some intellectual’s home and tells them that the game will be won, a revolution will take place in 1956. The intellectuals start to follow him as well.
That’s from the review of this film here. (The English remake is set in the early 1980s, when a posse of elderly former internationals respond to Thatcher by falling asleep with the direct intention of going back and preventing the ancient defeat from happening at all. But all they can achieve is to wake up in front of the telly, time after time: the film ends, or should do were someone actually to make it, with Brooking’s goals at the Nepstadion in June 1981).
Hungarian films are hard to come by, even in London, but I’d love to see this, and effective advice on finding a copy for purchase or rental would be very welcome indeed.
On reflection, there’s echoes in that plot of another famous football moment: the Likely Lads’ attempts to avoid knowing the score between England and Bulgaria in a 1973 episode. (Incidentally, England didn’t play Bulgaria that year: does anyone know the fake score? I’d like it for my records…)
There was no score – the punchline of the episode is that Brian Glover was actually trying to tell them that the game was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch, but Terry has already paid him the £10 bet in order to be able to watch the game in peace.
also related, I thought Old Scores was a rather better film than the IMDB crowd apparently did.
This is posted the day before Hungary actually won a game and beat the Italians 3-1, and no Tutti or Totti. The win got the main story, front page of the leading Hungarian broadsheet.
Long time since Hungary beat any team of consewuence. Ger and Priskin to the fore.
ps Haven’t seen the film but the director was one of the leading directors of the late 70s and early 80s and his cast has some pretty starry Hungarian names.