Following the celebration yesterday of the centenary of MTK(-VM)
Budapest, today’s very latest addition to the collection commemorates the name
of Vörös Lobogó, the ‘Red Flag’ under which MTK flew from 1953 – 56, during
which time, as domestic league champions, they became the first Hungarian club
to compete in the new European Cup, in the 1955 – 56 season, thrashing
Anderlecht by an aggregate of 10 – 4 before going out at the quarter-final
stage, in another goalfest, losing 6 – 8 overall to subsequently beaten
finalists Stade de Reims.
Thus this object is of a particularly desirable vintage, for
all that it lacks the traditional ‘MTK’ name, fixed as it is in the specific historical
time of not only the exciting birth of pan-European football club competition
but also immediately pre-Revolution communist Hungary (MTK had fallen under the
post-war control of the state security police, & ‘Vörös Lobogó’ was one of
a swift succession of name changes officially-imposed upon the club: for all
that it seemed a more exotic & ‘Hungarian’ name, &, from recollection, an
attraction from the earliest days of one’s Euro-fixation, its less edifying
associations can be appreciated), rich, then, in its ‘hauntological’ aspect.
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