The goals by Ádám Szalai and Zoltán Stieber propelled Hungary to victory in their first appearance in a major tournament for 30 years – and their first UEFA Euro finals game since 1972. These are the facts of Tuesday’s win against Austria, but what these few details don’t tell you is how this return to the football elite happened and why this wasn’t such a major surprise after all. Until October 2014, the Hungarian national team had horrible coaches. Period. The team was losing games it wasn’t supposed to lose and all they were trying to do was avoid humiliation against higher-ranked teams. Sometimes they got away with this mentality, sometimes they didn’t. Like the 2014 World Cup qualifier against the Netherlands (8-1), where at halftime (down four goals) coach Egervári’s motivational speech consisted of telling players that he didn’t want to suffer an eight-goal defeat. They did. The horrible thing about this is that the team wasn’t so bad that they deserved such a huge defeat. Then Pál Dárdai was appointed and something changed. Somehow he managed to make the team believe that they are good. Dárdai then went and along came Bernd Storck, who fortunately had the same mentality. His mantra: we’re good. And you could tell this against Austria. The players were walking, passing and shooting with confidence, and if you are confident in your abilities the rest will just fall in place. So with this confidence in hand a few hours before this edition of The Budapest Times went to press, Hungary defeated Austria 2-0. And now it’s going to get tough. What the team also had on its side was the fact that most opponents were looking down on it and considered the match against Hungary an easy victory. After Tuesday’s match we can’t count on that any more. But here is the good news: the team is confident now, so we don’t really have to.
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