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If Manchester City fans had only one question on their minds after the draw for the Europa League play-offs, it was probably this: Just who are FC Timisoara?

Having pulled the Romanians out of the glass bowl at Uefa HQ in Nyon two weeks ago, City fans will have been flocking to their atlases and busily clicking on web-based encyclopedias to find out more about the team that stands in their way of the group stage of European football's second-tier competition.

But the story of FC Timisoara, as they eventually came to be known, is one with many complications, on the Guardian website exactly a year ago as the club from the west of Romania prepared to face Stuttgart for a place in the Champions League.

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The headline in The Times said it all: . England, the inventors of the game, had never seen anything like it.

Hungary's 6-3 destruction of Walter Winterbottom's shell-shocked team at Wembley Stadium on was not only a defining moment in English football history but arguably the moment the baton passed from one sporting age to another.

As Ferenc Puskas, Nandor Hidegkuti and Sandor Kocsis passed devastating patterns around a dumbstruck England side, they did so with a style of play never seen before on these shores, dragging their opponents kicking and screaming into a new era.

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