LIKE all the best stories from Transylvania, the tale of CFR Cluj has a strong sense of mystery, of the unexpected. It also has its moment of shock and, at the end of the first night, even a perturbed heroine. “I didn’t believe it could be as bad as this,” shrieked Rosella Sensi, the president of AS Roma, as if she’d just woken up from a dream in which Bela Lugosi stood poised over her bedside.

The Romanians, making their debut in the group stages, had just defeated Roma 2-1 in the Italian capital on the opening evening of the Champions League. Apart from establishing that they had taken the domestic title out of Bucharest for the first time in a generation and that they have a handsome budget by Eastern European standards, the conclusion among Romans after the defeat was that Roma’s staff ought to have known more about their opponents.

Yet Roma would have been hard pressed to second-guess much about Cluj. The new head coach, an Italian named Maurizio Trombetta, was in charge that night for only his second competitive match; and the man who scored twice, Juan Emmanuel Culio, inset, had always been known for the sweetness of his left foot rather than his qualities as a finisher.

For just about everybody in the Cluj team, it seems to have been the match of a lifetime, none more so than Culio, a 25-year-old Argentine nomad, who even now has difficulty in putting the achievement into context. “Emperor Culio”, one Romanian headline branded him the day after his two goals, while the national FA was talking about granting him citizenship so that he might play for the country where he has lived for less than 18 months. In Argentina, a rigorous search was begun in an effort to discover where this player had emerged from.

“I don’t really like any sort of fame,” Culio said at the home he shares with his young family in Cluj. “All of us felt that the Champions League would be the opportunity to show what level we were at as footballers and that if we are there, it was because we deserved to be. We are a good side and we showed that against Roma.” Culio scored only once last season. His professional endeavours before that amounted to sporadic appearances for lesser clubs in Argentina. He worked on building sites as a teenager and, unable to crack a regular top-flight gig in Argentina, moved to Chile, before he was contacted with an offer to play for a provincial Romanian club with an ambitious president, Arpad Paszkany. “I didn’t know much about where I was going,” he recalls, “but it was good for my family. It’s not so different from where I come from, except maybe the food. It helped there were some other South Americans there. We can eat ourasadostogether.”

Cluj are almost as cosmopolitan as Arsenal, and Ipswich supporters may recall Argentine midfielder Sixto Peralta. As for Trombetta, his has been a giant leap. An assistant coach at Udinese, Napoli, Perugia, Bologna and Ancona, he became a a chief coach only last season in what is in effect Italy’s sixth division. Promoted from No 2 this month, he has made quite an impression. “He reads games very well,” says Culio. “He said to us in Rome, ‘Look out for how Roma’s full-backs both come up at the same time. They’ll leave space behind them and we can take advantage’. He was right.”

So on Wednesday, when Chelsea’s full-backs thrust forward, should they expect an ambush? “Listen, it’s 11 against 11,” says Culio, “but we have to be careful because there was so much euphoria after Roma.” Once bitten, twice shy, as they probably say in Transylvania.