Akos Elek looks back on his year with the national team

Akos Elek has had a good year, becoming a regular member of the Hungarian international team, while also helping Videoton FC to its first ever league title in the summer. The tall energetic midfielder spoke about the last twelve months. He made a total of ten appearances for Hungary in the process. His journey to representing his country has been a long and interesting road. Supporters around the country also count on Elek as a stable member of the national eleven. 

Were you counting on not only making your debut for Hungary, but staying in the squad following that?
I would say that as I broke into the squad last year, I was counting on getting further call up's. I do not think that this is automatic for me, even though it feels really good. The best feeling at times like this is the fact that I am representing the whole country, so it is only natural that I want to play at the expected level. 

The international team have done better than many would have expected. What is the reason behind this?
Everyone has understood what the coaching staff would like, and results have come earlier than expected. No one would have thought that we would win as many points as we did. A lot of this was thanks to us scoring winning goals late on in games. There were two qualifying games were we could not do what we had wanted. The first was the home match with Holland, where we began that game slowly, and we ended up comfortably losing. We had more about us in the return match a few days later. The other unlucky game was the home match with Finland, where we did not show that face, which we had done earlier. You could feel within the team that they were sad, as we had no chance of progressing due to the earlier match.

You showed against Finland in Helsinki, that you have a role to play in the team, after setting up the winner in the final minute of that 2-1 away win.

Yes, but even though I made my debut at Wembley stadium, but if I have to think back to one moment, it would be the away match against Finland. It was good that things turned out as they did. I do not wish to make a thing of this, and have only ever watched it once, and I do not like to look back, as the next task is always the most important. I have gone on to achieve other things for the national team since then. I managed to score my first goal for Hungary, and set up another goal as well. From the teams point of view, it is much more important that with a new squad, we have began working with a new system. This helped us to achieve an even better result than was expected, and we remained with a chance right until the end.