What was strange about Sunday’s Manchester derby was how routine it felt. When Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 it was a scoreline heard around the world, the death knell for any lingering sense of English footballing pre-eminence and confirmation of the excellence of Gusztav Sebes’s side. It opened the most complacent eyes to football’s new era and even in those free-scoring days it was a result unusual enough that to speak of “the 6-3” was to conjure images of Nandor Hidegkuti shredding English pretension in the Wembley fog.
Sunday’s 6-3 was, well, what exactly? Like the game in 1953, it didn’t seem anything like a full expression of the gulf between the sides: the team who got three should have felt simultaneously chastened at the magnitude of the defeat and very fortunate to have got away with only a three-goal margin.
