My life is like a love affair. I loved football at the start and I will love it at the end

Four days later, Puskas crossed the Austrian border with his Honved team-mates, heading for Vienna on the start of a journey that would keep him away from his homeland for 24 years. "There were a lot of double-takes," he later said. "They thought I was a ghost."

This time, it really was the end. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's for several years, and, after two months in intensive care with pneumonia, there could be no reprieve. Puskas died on Friday, eight days short of the 53rd anniversary of the game that established him as one of the greats. When Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953, it felt as though Britain would never again witness a team performance of such calibre; seven years later it came as Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 at Hampden. Puskas was key to both.

In 1953, Britain was still great. The war was over, and won, rationing was coming to an end, the Festival of Britain was fresh in the memory and there was a young queen newly crowned - her place in the divine order of things seemingly confirmed as news broke on the day of the Coronation that the Empire had conquered Everest. And, of course, in popular opinion, England were still the best in the world at football, unbeaten at home against foreign opposition, as the joke of the time had it, since 1066 (provided, of course, you ignored, as most did, the defeat to the Republic of Ireland at Good ison Park in 1949).

On that foggy November afternoon in 1953, though, England were outplayed. Six months later, Hungary beat them again, 7-1, in Budapest. England had believed herself innately supreme, but in two matches, clinically and comprehensively, Hungary proved just how far the world had moved on, and just how far England, Britain, had been left behind.

Tactics certainly played a part, but they were only the outward manifestation of a more fund amental shift in football. In Britain, players were still defined and to an extent limited by their roles. The centre-half marked the opposing centre-forward, the wingers dribbled, the inside forwards schemed. Puskas, nominally Hungary's inside-left, could certainly scheme, but he was far more than that. He was, as Johan Cruyff would later become for Ajax and Holland, the central intelligence in an organism in near-constant flux. "If a good player has the ball, he should have the vision to spot three options," the full-back Jeno Buzanszky said. "Puskas always saw at least five."

Yet, frankly, he did not look like a footballer. Even at his peak, he was inclined to tubbiness. When a boy, playing in Kispest, then still a village distinct from the capital, a local butcher would award a salami to the winners of street-matches - no mean incentive in those austere days - and his love of food and drink never disappeared.

Billy Wright spoke of being amazed, after Honved's defeat to Wolves in 1954, at Puskas' capacity for cheese and biscuits. The Hung arian also enjoyed a number of nights out with Jim Baxter, who claimed his guest knew only two words of English - "vhisky" and "jiggy-jig". Baxter often told the story of arriving at a party in Drumchapel, walking into the scullery, and finding Puskas "jiggy-jigging" away.

The excess, though, never got in the way of the football, and certainly the England player who scoffed at "that fat little man" shortly before kick-off quickly learned how deceptive appearances could be.

Puskas, who had enraptured the commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme with some keepie-ups as he waited for the game to kick off, was mesmerising, rarely operating at more than half-pace, controlling the tempo of the game with an extraordinary range of passes. On another day the lobbed cross with which he set up the sixth goal for Nandor Hidegkuti would have captured the attention, but on this occasion it was very much secondary to his goal, Hungary's third. A sweeping move ended in a low cross from the right that found Puskas at the near post.

A right-footed player would probably have struck it first time, but Puskas controlled it, drawing Wright into the challenge "like a fire engine rushing to the wrong fire", as Geoffrey Green put it in The Times. Puskas rolled the ball back with the sole of his left boot, and, as Wright sprawled, thrashed his finish past Gil Merrick. It was as good a rebuttal as there could be to those who carped about his one-footedness.

"You can only kick the ball with one foot at once," Puskas once said, the familiar urchin fire playing around his eyes. "Otherwise you fall on your arse."

That impishness was a part of his greatness, and his greatness allowed him to be more impish than anyone else. The authorities turned a blind eye to the smuggling he organised to supplement his team's incomes, for instance, and when he was presented with a silver cutlery set in 1953 on the occasion of his 50th cap, he responded by handing a silver vase to Mihaly Farkas, the Minister of Defence. When Farkas demurred, he replied: "Keep it, old man; who knows what the future brings?" - a remarkably risky joke given both Farkas' power and the precariousness of his position in the weeks following Stalin's death. On another occasion, when Farkas visited the team wearing a white general's uniform, Puskas mockingly asked what had happened to the usual ice-cream boy.

All could be forgiven, at least while Hungary were winning. After their 3-2 defeat to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final, though, the mood turned. For many the defeat was incomprehensible, and frustration turned into violent street protests. Some claimed the English referee, Bill Ling, and his Welsh linesman, Mervyn Griffiths, who ruled out a last-minute Puskas strike for offside, had deliberately penalised Communist Hungary; others claimed the players had been bribed; more sober observers wondered wenhether Puskas, who had missed the quarter-final and semi-final, had been fit ough to play.

He began to be booed at away games, and when Honved fled the uprising to tour first western Europe and then Brazil and Venezuela, it was little surprise that he didn't return, despite Fifa's threat of a life ban.

He eventually served an 18-month suspension, by which time his weight had ballooned. He was 31, and there were few who could see any sense in Santiago Bernabeu's offer of a four-year contract worth almost $100,000. He lost 18kg, though, and his second coming was a majestic vindication, bringing five Spanish titles and, most gloriously, three European Cups. Four times he was top-scorer in Spain, even though, in his first season, he effectively handed the award to Alfredo di Stefano. The pair were level on 21 goals heading into the final game of the season, and late on Puskas, with a chance to shoot, opted instead to square for the notoriously prickly Argentine to score instead. Team harmony was preserved, and Di Stefano and Puskas became a devastating combination.

Their partnership reached its apogee in the European Cup final of 1960. Rangers' 12-4 aggregate defeat in the semi-final had proved what a good side Eintracht Frankfurt were, and yet Real outplayed them. "That blissful night, we almost achieved some kind of football perfection," Puskas said. Journalist Richard Widdows wrote that "the crowd noted the day, 18 May 1960, and marked it as others had done St Crispin's Day and counted themselves lucky to have been there."

Di Stefano hit three, but this time Puskas refused to play second fiddle. He scored four, and then, having glanced at the referee's watch with a minute to go, counted down the seconds to ensure he, and not the Argentine, ended up with the match ball.

Yet at the final whistle he handed the ball to Erwin Stein, who had scored two of Eintracht's goals. "He had scored twice and lost," Puskas said. "It was the least I could do."

Two years later, Puskas would come to know the feeling as he scored three and lost, Benfica beating Real 5-3 in the final.

"My life is like a love affair," he once said. "I loved football at the start and I will love it at the end."

He was a larger than life character and a great player, and, almost uniquely, he did it for two larger than life teams.

"You say Hungary, and people think Puskas," said Karpati. "If you go to Venezuela, or Naples, or Australia, people know Puskas. Puskas is Hungary, Hungary is Puskas. And you can't say more than that."