Formed in 1996 by merging three local clubs from the town of Ostersund, OFK joined the third tier of Swedish football. Director of Football Daniel Kindberg used his connections with Roberto Martinez at Swansea to loan players and help build the club’s profile throughout the 2000’s. Östersunds fortunes then took a downward turn when they were relegated to the fourth tier in 2010. Kindberg had already walked away from the club at this point.
“I didn’t like the negativity and the way we were fighting about stupid things. It was the normal thing in football: white, heterosexual, powerful men arguing and blaming each other for this and that. I’d had enough, so I left.�?/p>
“Then one day, I was at home, and I had a knock on the door. The players told me they wanted me back. Otherwise, they would all quit, too. I took a couple of days to think about it. As a military officer and businessman, you don’t make decisions based on feelings, but in football, you’re a kid again, and I took the emotional decision to come back. We had almost nothing: a couple of players, a stadium, one half-time employee and an annual turnover of �?00,000. We started all over again.�?/p>
This is when Kindberg got serious. He drummed up more local financing in the town of just 50,000 residents and brought in ex journeyman professional player Graham Potter as manager. Southampton fans will remember Potter from playing in the famous 6-3 win over Man Utd in 1996. He also had long spells at Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion and York City, but no prior managerial experience before joining OFK.
“When I arrived and I told people I was working for the football club they would say: ‘What are you doing – they’re rubbish! This is an ice hockey town!�?�?Potter recently told the English press.
“People were really friendly,�?he recalls. “I’d be out with my wife and they’d ask why we were here. When I told them, they’d immediately look concerned or puzzled and tell us it was ‘useless�? ‘impossible�? or: ‘You’re crazy.’�?/p>
Potter proved the locals wrong, however, and his signing proved to be an inspired one as he led the young team to two successive promotions. Then in 2015 the 42 year old secured promotion to the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s top flight, for the first time in the club’s short history.
“At first we had crowds of about 500,�?says Potter. They now attract over ten times that many fans and have moved to a bigger stadium.
But the story doesn’t end there. In April 2017 he guided the team to their first piece of silverware when they thumped IFK Norrköping 4-1 in the Swedish Cup Final. This victory earned OFK the chance to qualify for this year’s Europa League.
Against all the odds, OFK beat Galatasaray 3-1 on aggregate in the Europa qualifying stage and then went on to advance through the play-offs, knocking out Greek side PAOK on away goals.
OFK’s amazing momentum continued as they qualified from the group stage of the competition and now face the mighty Arsenal in the knock-out phase.
Introducing Östersunds Fotbollsklubb]]>In 1950/51, the famous “push and run�?side under Arthur Rowe was a revelation in a more industrial age, their sharp passing and constant moving of the football taking English football by storm as they first won promotion and then, the following year, 1950/51, won the Football League itself, finishing runners-up to Manchester United a year later.
That was the last hurrah for an ageing side, one which needed major rebuilding as a number of stars who had lost much of their football to the war were put out to pasture. Rowe himself moved on, with wing-half Bill Nicholson hanging up his boots to take on the management of the club following a mixed spell under Jimmy Anderson, slowly reconstructing the side around the talismanic figure of captain Danny Blanchflower.
Blanchflower was what we would today term a playmaker. As he admitted himself, it was an expression of his ego that he would touch the ball perhaps twice as much as anyone else in the side, but always it was with a purpose, for a reason. The Northern Irishman was a footballing intellectual in those far off days when players weren’t allowed to train with the ball in the week, doing lap after lap of souls aping running instead. “You’ll be hungrier for it on Saturday that way�?ran the argument. “But how will I recognise it on Saturday if I haven’t seen it all week?�?was Blanchflower’s retort.
Spurs were ahead of the game. Dour Yorkshireman he might have been, but Bill Nicholson was a love of the beautiful game, steeped in Rowe’s passing philosophy, a philosophy he expanded upon as he set about creating the century’s first double winners.
Training under Bill Nick was all about using the ball, about teamwork, about shape, about building an understanding. Where too many sides were of the traditional English kick and rush, following the powerhouse brand of the game made famous by Stan Cullis�?Wolves just as all too many sides today still do, Spurs were all light and shade, contrasts, intelligence, firebrand movement, elusive, skilful, purposeful.
In a way, they were a thoroughly modern entity, football’s white shirted embodiment of the “white heat of technology�?that Harold Wilson would seize upon to try to shape his Premiership of the country. Spurs were playing a new game, moving on the Hungarian model, use bright skills not brute force, creating clever triangles, advancing up the park by passing the opposition to death.
Blanchflower, as we’ve noted, was the orchestrator, the conductor, but all around him were virtuoso performers. Dave Mackay might now be caricatured as the hardman to end all hardmen, but that was just one facet of a multi-dimensional game. Mackay could play too, perhaps without quite the finesse of his skipper, but he was a rare footballer of rare quality with the burning lifeforce of the natural born winner and the quality to impose that competitive streak onto games in myriad ways, be they deft, be they aggressive.
Out on the flanks, there were the quicksilver Cliff Jones and Terry Dyson, a pair of wingers so quick yet so skilful that when given the right service from Blanchflower and Mackay �?and that was what they got from those models of consistency- they could destroy any full-back at will. The service they provided for the burly Bobby Smith and the lethal inside forwards who supported him, John White and Les Allen, made Tottenham the most potent side in the land.
And if they ever lost the ball and somehow the opposition did get past Mackay, there was the monumental Maurice Norman to deal with, the England international who was utterly resolute in defence but good enough on the ball to find the midfielders time and again. Full-backs Peter Baker and Ron Henry were all but auxiliary wingers so keen were Spurs to flood forward and entertain, then there was the last line of defence, Scotland’s Bill Brown, drafted in from Dundee and wholly reliable.
But it was Nicholson who should have the lion’s share of the credit. Taking the reins in November 1958, his first season was spent simply keeping Spurs afloat. They ended 18th in a horrible season, but the following year they were third and they were flying. They were ready.
Thy reeled off 11 straight wins to start the season, and by the end of 1960, they’d played 25, won 22, drawn two, lost one. The league was in the bag, they could go all out for the double, the prize no-one had won since the turn of the century. After a close call in beating Charlton 3-2, they were imperious in the FA Cup �?Crewe 5-1, Villa 2-0, Sunderland 5-0, Burnley 3-0. Leicester stood between them and immortality and though Blanchflower was characteristically upset when the final didn’t contain the glory and the romance that he demanded from the game, the deed was done with a 2-0 win.
Jimmy Greaves was added to the already high octane mix the following season as Tottenham were again impressive. A second straight title was just beyond them, finishing third behind Ipswich who won the title in their first ever season in the First Division, a side managed, ironically, by Alf Ramsey, a member of Spurs�?push and run maestros of �?1, but playing an altogether more cagey game in Suffolk.
The European Cup distracted Spurs, losing at the semi-final stage to Eusebio’s Benfica, but they’d already booked a place in the FA Cup Final, a trophy they defended in style, picking Burnley apart at Wembley. A year later they became the first English club to succeed in Europe, winning the Cup Winners�?Cup, smashing Atletico Madrid 5-1 in the final.
Tottenham continued to be a fine side beyond that 1963, but that little spark had gone. It was the absence of Blanchflower, football’s great romantic, Scott Fitzgerald with a ball instead of a typewriter. How we could use a visionary like that today.
Tottenham Hotspur 1960-63 �?A Profile]]>So many of the sporting triumphs of the Iron Curtain nations in the post-war, pre Berlin Wall fall period have been discredited because of the methods by which physical supremacy was won, and by the way in which the games were played. But not Honved.
Hungary was a little different to some of those Soviet satellites, certainly in the immediate post-war years. Budapest itself was occupied by the Germans in 1944 before, in December of that year, Soviet and Romanian troops laid siege to the city. From frying pan to fire went the capital city and the country as a whole, but in spite of the occupation and oppression, a sense of identity and even intellectual resistance persisted.
And ironically, Honved were to offer an outlet for that, for from the roots of that side grew the full flowering of the mighty Magyars, the national side that bestrode world football and ultimately inspired the Brazilians and the way in which they revolutionised football with Garrincha, Zagallo, Pele and all.
It’s all the more surprising since Honved did not exist until 1949 when Hungary became a communist state. It grew from Kispest FC, a club side which already included the genius of Ferenc Puskas and Jozsef Bozsik, but it came into being under the auspices of the national team coach Gsztav Sebes who, drawing on the experience of the pre-war Austrian wunderteam, realised it was wise to draw the national side from just a couple of sources rather than a dozen disparate teams.
In a communist state, creating an army team and conscripting any player you wanted made that perfectly possible, and so Honved was born, the word meaning defender of the homeland, a role they figuratively took up for the next few years, the Hungarian nation being as much a state of mind as a piece of land in those repressive days.
Success took little time to arrive, Honved carrying off their first league title in 1949/50, the first of five titles they were to collect by 1955. To the ranks were swiftly added Sandor Kocsis, Gyula Crocsis, Zoltan Czibor, Laszlo Budai and Gyula Lorant, names that echo down the years.
Sebes’ theories quickly came to fruition, for as Honved bestrode the national game, their players grew to know one another as well as they knew themselves. To employ the cliche, the team functioned like clockwork, except that is to do them an injustice.
The team played with fluidity, with intelligence, with verve, with wit. The football field gave them a release from the realities of Hungarian life, gave them a chance to express themselves, to express the fact that they were not all part of the drab uniformity of the communist state, that they were not as unthinkingly obedient as, for instance, the East Germans.
The Hungarians carried off the Olympic gold medal in 1952, they ended England�img src="http://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.1.0/72x72/2122.png" alt="�? class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />s long unbeaten home run in 1953 and were within a whisker of winning the World Cup which was truly their just desserts in 1954.
At the beating heart of it all was the Honved combination, the irony being that such was their charisma that these representatives of the workers utopia became celebrities, became the side that everyone wanted to see.
As football embraced two new innovations “television and floodlights�?Honved were the team the world wanted to see. The flickering black and white images that remain show a team that played a new kind of football, a world away from the powerhouse, kick and rush style so prevalent in this country.
With Puskas scheming, with players talking up unorthodox positions on the pitch, with the team using a scientific, possession football approach, they gave us a new conception of the game and, though they were ultimately beaten 3-2 by Wolves under the lights at Molineux in that first TV game in December 1953, they were the moral victors.
That game not only changed how football might be played, it changed how and where we might play it for it played a huge role in the establishment of the European Cup, which came into being in 1955/56. Honved missed the inaugural season, but were in the mix for 1956/57 when they were drawn to play Athletic Bilbao November 1956. Events were then to change the course of history for Honved.
They slipped to a 3-2 defeat in Spain but before they could return home, the Hungarian revolution had been crushed by Soviet tanks. With the borders still open, the players summoned their families and refused to return, playing the return leg at the Heysel Stadium. Their goalkeeper was injured, Czibor had to go between the posts and they drew 3-3 to go out of the competition and all but end their story.
The team as it was constituted went on a brief fundraising in Italy, Portugal and Spain, thrilling crowds with their last hurrah. FIFA in its typically infinite wisdom swiftly outlawed the team while they were playing in a tournament in Brazil, so there was to be no future for them as a footballing version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Returning to Europe, some found new clubs and defected to the west, others chose to go back home.
The majesty of the Magyars was a thing of the past, but in the end, only tanks could stop them.
Honved Of Budapest In The 1950s]]>