Fifty years ago next Tuesday, English football's castle crumbled. On a dank afternoon at Wembley, Hungary finally ended England's unbeaten home record against continental opposition. But it was worse than that. The defeat was by a humbling 6-3 and not only had the "Magic Magyars" shown themselves to be superior in everything from ball skills to tactics, they opened England's wounds even wider by dedicating the historic victory to an Englishman.
Sitting in the stands was a 71-year-old, white-haired little Lancastrian surrounded by athletic-looking young men. His name was Jimmy Hogan and the youths were Aston Villa juniors he was still coaching. If ever there was a prophet without honour in his own country it was Hogan and, poignantly, shortly after the game ended, the president of the Hungarian Football Association, Sandor Barcs, said: "Jimmy Hogan taught us everything we know about football."
English FA officials were doubly mortified. The match had seen Ferenc Puskas and his superb team humiliate England; now they were hearing that Hogan had planted the seeds not only of a Hungarian football revolution but one that had spread across the whole of Europe. Hardly any wonder that many years later England's captain, Billy Wright, told me: "There were people who were of a mind to call Jimmy Hogan a traitor."
In fact Hogan was a patriot and admirer of the way English football had been played before his work, and that of his Austrian friend Hugo Meisl, showed its flaws. His coaching was based on ball mastery which in 1953 was seen to be deficient in the English players, just as it is today. Throughout his long career he never asked anyone to do anything that he himself could not achieve, but his standards both of skill and morality (he was a devoted Roman Catholic) were so high that when he did return to England to manage Aston Villa and Fulham in the 1930s and coach at Celtic, the senior players, feeling inferior, argued that they had no need of his teaching.
Curiously, Hogan himself had taken up football in the early 20th century without family encouragement. His parents had left Ireland to find work in the Lancashire cotton industry. Jimmy's father wanted him to become a priest but football won the argument. In a fairly modest career he played for Burnley, Bolton, Fulham and Swindon as a skilful inside forward. It was a summer tour of Holland with Bolton that persuaded him to take up coaching. Bolton easily beat Dordrecht and he vowed to go back and "teach them how to play". In his early 30s he did indeed return to become the youngest-ever British coach to take up a permanent position on the continent.
He soon realised that the continental players had a different attitude from those in England. They said it was up to them to get themselves fit, what they expected of the coach was not the typical British notion that stamina would win in the end and that being deprived of the ball all week would make them all the more hungry for it on Saturday. They demanded to know how to improve their ball skills and how to use them to produce effective teamwork. Hogan was teaching Total Football generations before Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer brought that term into the game's language.
In an adventurous career, he taught thousands of young players in Holland, Austria, Hungary, France and even Africa. In many cases he helped them develop into outstanding internationals and, in some instances, become world famous coaches, including the West German manager Helmut Schoen whom he coached at Dresden and who called him "a shining example for the coaching profession".
The outbreak of the first world war found him coaching in Austria. On the day war was declared he was woken at dawn and thrown into prison. He remained an internee for the duration but was allowed to go to Hungary where he worked with the MTK club who formed the basis of the national team that would develop into the great side of the 1950s. However, when the war ended he returned to England and was told that men who had suffered financially as a result of the war could claim £200 from the FA. He was almost destitute but when he went to London the secretary, Frederick Wall, opened a cupboard and offered him a pair of khaki socks:
"We sent these to the boys at the front and they were grateful." The unsubtle message was: "Traitor."
The highlight of his career was working with Meisl to produce the Austrian Wunderteam who lost by only 4-3 to England at Stamford Bridge in 1932. Even so his message that English football was about to be overtaken was ignored. In the end he came back to Britain as a manager but returned to his real love, coaching. At Celtic one of his pupils was Tommy Docherty who says Hogan was his greatest influence, as does Ron Atkinson, who was taught by him at Villa, and the Irish winger Peter McParland who was among the "boys" with him on that portentous day at Wembley.
After the 1953 defeat the English press campaigned to have Hogan involved in restoring English football but, wrongly, he was considered too old. He died in 1974 aged 91, still a patriot but with good cause to be bitter.
· Prophet or Traitor? by Norman Fox is published by The Parrs Wood Press (£9.95) www.parrswoodpress.com