Wolves: Champions Of The World!
It Was What It Was : The Football History Podcast
The Overlap
4.9 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on It Was What It Was, Jonathan and Rob introduce us to the team - and the match - that played a huge part in the invention of the European Cup...
“Champions of the World!” was the headline given to Wolverhampton Wanderers, when they beat the mighty Hungarian team Honvéd, led by Ferenc Puskas, in 1954.
Billy Wright was the star of the show for a game that many saw as reestablishing England as top football nation. But was it just gamesmanship that won the day for this great Wolves side? And how did that grandiose headline annoy the French so much it led to the formation of the European Cup (and consequently the Champions League) a year later?
Wolves 3 Honvéd 2 is one of the most significant matches ever; a great night of European football that paved the way for so many historic moments in years to come.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I may never live to see a greater thriller than this. |
| 0:10.3 | And if I see many more as thrilling, I may not live much longer anyway. |
| 0:14.5 | Well, welcome to It Was What It Was with me, Rob Draper, and with Jonathan Wilson. |
| 0:18.5 | And that was Peter Wilson in the Daily Mirror |
| 0:21.3 | writing about one of the |
| 0:22.9 | really great all-time European matches |
| 0:25.8 | Wolves against Honved in |
| 0:28.2 | 1954 and you may not have heard of it |
| 0:31.3 | because it was pre the Champions League |
| 0:33.2 | pre the European Cup |
| 0:34.8 | but it really was a forerunner |
| 0:36.5 | for the European football we see today. |
| 0:39.5 | It's a hugely important game. It was obviously, as Peter Wilson describes, also a hugely |
| 0:44.3 | thrilling and entertaining game. And to describe and give us the context as to why we should be |
| 0:50.0 | talking about it and why it's exciting and why we're talking about it just now in December |
| 0:54.9 | is Jonathan Wilson. Jonathan, tell us what are we doing talking about this game? |
| 1:00.1 | It's the 70th anniversary of this game on the 13th of December. So that's the specific reason why |
| 1:05.7 | we're talking about it. But I think the reason this game has remembered so fondly, I mean, |
| 1:10.0 | I think it really was a very direct foron of, I mean, I think it really was a very direct foreign of the European Cup. |
| 1:12.8 | I think it really was a direct trigger for the invention of that competition. |
| 1:17.5 | It's probably the most famous, the most dramatic of the so-called floodliff friendlies, |
| 1:22.7 | a series of floodlick games between English sides and foreign opposition in the early 50s, and we'll come on to |
... |
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