Saturday, December 28, 2024
Dance, Toro, Part 3
June 17, 1979. The Ujpest Dozsa team, champions of Hungary again, have just played their last league match of the season: an away game against Zalaegerszeg, a club from the west of the country near the Austrian border. Andras Torocsik, ever the individualist, has somehow managed to convince the coach Pal Varhidi to let him travel back to the capital in a friend's car, rather than on the team coach.
The friends had barely begun their journey when they skidded off the road into a ditch near the village of Zalacsany, and crashed into a tree. Their Fiat 500 was wrecked, and the Ujpest striker was badly injured. Consigned to crutches for the next three months, he was so badly hurt that there were initially fears that he wouldn't play again. The invitation from Enzo Bearzot to join his World XI team in Argentina was, quite literally, in his pocket when the accident occurred. The chance to play alongside the likes of Michel Platini, Zico, Paolo Rossi, Zbigniew Boniek and other stars of the era was suddenly gone.
Why was he allowed to go home by car at all? To this day the question is asked. But essentially, it was probably the old story of the prima donna: the star player sometimes gets to play by his own rules. The more serious aspect of the incident was that it was the first of many occasions on which Torocsik's fondness for alcohol got him into serious trouble.
It says something for Torocsik's character and determination that he not only recovered, but was prepared to alter his playing style to accommodate the fact that he was no longer as physically powerful as before. He dropped a little deeper and wider, becoming a creator as much as a scorer of goals. Many people noted that his goalscoring record declined sharply after the accident, but compensating attributes emerged.
He was still playing well enough to return to the national side prior to the 1982 World Cup, although there had been another brief ban in the meantime - due to another car accident, in which Torocsik, again the worse for liquor, had collided with a car which (unluckily for him) was being driven by the wife of a Communist party official. Torocsik's reputation was certainly well enough known by the time the Hungarians embarked on a pre-World Cup visit to Australia. "Soccer rates behind wine, women, pop stars and fast cars among the Ujpest Dozsa player's priorities," was the introduction to a profile piece in the local Soccer Action newspaper.
The World Cup in Spain was not quite the same sort of shop-window opportunity for Torocsik that Argentina had been, but he was still hoping to catch the eye of the scouts - a large late-career paycheck from a western European club was a tempting prospect. Alas, the 1982 tournament was to be another disappointment. Although "Toro" started in Hungary's astonishing 10-1 victory over El Salvador, he was not one of the scorers, and the player who substituted him, future clubmate Laszlo Kiss, promptly scored a hat-trick.
Torocsik was left out for the next game, the rematch against Argentina. Perhaps this was for the best as far as he was concerned; Diego Maradona had his best game of the tournament, running rings around the Hungarian defence, and Argentina won 4-1. Torocsik returned for the group decider against Belgium, but he had little impact on a tight, niggly game. Alex Czerniatynski's late equaliser for the Belgians condemned the Magyars to go home early again. The scouts moved on.
There were still moments of high quality at club level, often in international cup-ties; soon after the World Cup, he scored a lovely goal and set up two more in classy style against the Swedish side Goteborg. Ujpest fans were left with another moment to savour in October 1983 when Torocsik, in his role as creator, twice elegantly left the Cologne defender Paul Steiner flailing before sending in a perfect cross for his clubmate Sandor Kiss (no relation to Laszlo) to open the scoring. As one Ujpest fan later commented, when musing on Torocsik's decline, "We'll always have Steiner." Their man still knew how to dance.
But the chance of a move beyond the Iron Curtain was becoming more distant. Torocsik's international career was over by 1985, and he was approaching 30 when a lifeline appeared: there was interest from the French club Montpellier. The first Ujpest game which the president of the French club watched ended up being a repeat of Buenos Aires in 1978: things weren't going Torocsik's way, and as sometimes happened in such situations, he saw red, kicked out at an opponent and was sent off. It was perhaps only the crowd's obvious affection for him (and the fact that Montpellier's assistant coach was Sandor Zombori, his old international colleague) that convinced Montpellier to give him a try.
Finally "Toro" was off to the west. But it was not to be a happy ending.
To be concluded in Part 4.
