KEY POINTS:
Ferenc Puskas, international footballer. Died aged 79.
Ferenc Puskas, the most mesmerising of the Magical Magyars who died this week aged 79, was the captain, inspiration and match-winner of a 1950s Hungarian national football team some still argue was the best the world has ever seen.
His
left foot, the scourge of defences for 20 years after World War II, earned him an international goalscoring record that stood for 50 years.
Puskas was the Budapest street urchin who rose to the pinnacle of world soccer against the austere backdrop of an eastern European communist state system before fleeing to the west and starting a second career with the world's most glamorous club, Real Madrid.
His football fantasy life, interwoven with drinking sprees, rebellions and off-field antics which would make coaches cringe, evokes nostalgia for a golden era when the name of the game was goals galore and caution was abandoned.
Puskas has a unique place in football folklore as the only man to play in perhaps the two most famous games in history - Hungary's stunning 6-3 victory over England at Wembley in 1953 and Real Madrid's 7-3 demolition of Eintracht Frankfurt in the 1960 European Cup final.
The Galloping Major, as he was known in Britain, scored six of the 19 goals in those two epics and brought the house down in both.
Short and stocky, Puskas hardly cut the figure of a world class player. Indeed, prior to the kick off of the 1953 Wembley game, one of the England players mocked him as "that little fat chap". But, just as Diego Maradona was to do some two decades or so later, he used his low centre of gravity to devastating effect, scoring an amazing 83 goals in 84 games for Hungary.
The vast majority were with his ferocious left foot. The right, it was always suggested, did little more than guarantee he did not have to hop around the pitch. Puskas almost revelled in this, saying: "If you kick with both feet, you fall on your arse".
Olympic champions in 1952, Hungary became the first continental team to vanquish a supposedly invincible England at Wembley, bewildering the sport's inventors with tactical and technical brilliance. Puskas scored two of Hungary's six goals.
England suffered a 7-1 humiliation in Budapest the following year and Hungary were hot favourites to lift the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland.
That they did not was always the greatest regret of Puskas' career. Injured in an earlier 8-3 drubbing of West Germany, Puskas returned for the final, again against the Germans, and scored as his side took an early 2-0 lead. But luck seemed to desert them as Germany went 3-2 ahead and a Puskas equaliser in the dying minutes was ruled out for offside.
After the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he defected and signed for the Real Madrid side led by Alfredo Di Stefano.
"I had to lose 18 kilos when I joined Real and I had to behave a bit differently because I was the new boy at Real and there were a lot of established stars there," he said.
He and Di Stefano came close to a perfect understanding, their zenith coming in the 1960 European Cup final, when Puskas scored four and Di Stefano three. It was Real's fifth successive European title.
Though Puskas was already 33 then, he went on to score 35 goals in 37 European Cup games for Real, including a hat-trick in the 5-3 defeat to Benfica in the 1962 final.