Wem Town

From Tolworth to Budapest:
Corinthian-Casuals make
history at new amateur
tournament
In the game's early days, the famous sides Corinthians and Casuals toured in Hungary –
more than a century on, their composite club returned for a taste of European glory
17 July In the sweltering haze of a June heatwave in Budapest, a group of south-west
Londoners, dressed mainly in pink, stood on the crumbling terrace of the Szonyi uti Stadion
in the leafy Zuglo district and serenaded the 300-strong crowd with a rousing medley of
songs about their team.
Corinthian-Casuals – two amateur teams merged to form the composite club in 1939 – had
not set foot in Budapest for 115 years, but the return of England’s highest-ranked amateurs
had earned them several pages of press coverage in Hungary. The Isthmian Premier
League club were in town for the inaugural Egri Erbstein Tournament for the Corinthian
Cup, and almost 100 of their most vocal supporters had followed them here, thrilled by the
prospect of seeing their team playing in Europe.
The competition is a new international tournament for amateur teams and takes its name
from Erno Egri Erbstein, the manager of the famous Torino side that dominated Italian
football in the immediate post-war era, winning five consecutive titles before perishing in
the Superga air disaster of May 1949. Egri Erbstein was not just a pioneering coach but
also a Holocaust survivor, who had achieved his unprecedented success after returning to
Italy to take up the job he had initially been forced to flee due to the passing of Benito
Mussolini’s race laws in 1938.
Now his achievements are being celebrated in the country of his birth thanks to a group of
football enthusiasts in Budapest who, inspired by Egri Erbstein’s story, decided to reestablish
the first football club he represented as a player.
Budapesti Atletikai Klub, or BAK, initially folded in the 1940s, but had once been cup
finalists and a top-three team. They joined the sixth tier of Hungarian football last summer
and their nostalgic president, Bertalan Molnar, made it the club’s primary objective to mark
the 70th anniversary of the Superga air disaster with a post-season tournament in Egri
Erbstein’s name.
Molnar was keen to find a like-minded English club with which to form some kind of
friendship and Corinthian-Casuals fitted that bill. After all, both Corinthians and Casuals
had visited Budapest in the early stages of the game’s development in Hungary and their
performances made a big impression. In fact, upon returning to London after
their tour in 1904, the Corinthians minted a solid silver trophy, the Corinthian
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