Soccer History | Wankdorf, Bern — The Clock Still Reads Ungarn 2, Deutschland 3

The clock outside the stadium has not moved since 4 July 1954. Longines, blue and gold, the hands stopped, and under the dial two words with two numbers: Ungarn 2, Deutschland 3. Hungary were supposed to win. They had beaten West Germany 8-3 in the group stage three weeks earlier and arrived in Bern on a long unbeaten run, though sources give its length as either 30 matches or 32 — a fair measure of how carefully the story has been handled since. Ferenc Puskás put them ahead in the 6th minute. Zoltán Czibor made it 2-0 two minutes after that. Max Morlock pulled one back in the 10th, Helmut Rahn levelled in the 18th, and Rahn scored again six minutes from the end. Puskás thought he had equalised late; the goal was ruled offside, and that decision has been argued over ever since. It rained all afternoon. The referee was William Ling of England, and the attendance is recorded as 62,500 in the standard reference and 60,000 in some contemporary summaries. West Germany became the third country to win a World Cup, and did it as a visiting team rather than a host. The part that gets handled badly in both directions is what was in the syringes. Puskás accused the German players of doping and was pressed into withdrawing the accusation. Decades later a study commissioned by Germany's Federal Institute of Sport Science, led by Giselher Spitzer and Erik Eggers, reported indications that the squad had been injected with Pervitin — methamphetamine — rather than the vitamin C claimed at the time. Indications are what the study reports. No case was proven, no result was changed, and both of those facts belong in any honest account. The ground itself came down in 2001. The Stadion Wankdorf that opened on the site in 2005 keeps the restored match clock standing outside its south entrance, which is as close as the 1954 final now gets to a fixed address. Sources: Wikipedia; reporting on the Federal Institute of Sport Science doping study (The Blizzard, Fox Sports); Al Jazeera; Malay Mail. Cover photo: Sandstein, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.