When the expected 2,800 Hungary fans arrive in Bucharest for their Euro 2016 qualifier against Romania on Saturday, they will be escorted directly to the stadium in an attempt to avoid the trouble that broke out when the sides met last year in a World Cup qualifier.

The stadium will be sold out, with tickets given by the Romanian football federation (FRF) to ultras from each of the major Bucharest teams. They have promised a ferocious atmosphere, which may or may not include a controversial new anthem composed for the qualifiers. It contains the line: “Let’s go at them, at their mothers,” which apparently is not quite as offensive in Romanian as it sounds in English, but still prompted the former Romania international and manager Laszlo Boloni, who is of Hungarian descent, to comment that the people who wrote it must have been “of very, very low intellect”.

The historical antipathy between the nations is understandable – rooted in on-continuing Hungarian resentment that Transylvania, which had been part of Hungary, was given to Romania as part of the Treaty of Trianon after the first world war – yet the notion of Hungarian fans as high-risk is, frankly, hard to square with the mood in Budapest in May, when I was among just over 3,000 who watched Hungary stumble to an unconvincing win over Albania in a friendly.

I’ve never known a crowd so apathetic, boredom palpable almost from the first whistle, the only real engagement coming when a Hungarian did something ludicrously bad – a carefully placed pass out of play, an air shot, a sliced clearance – which happened surprisingly often. The only goal was a late Tamas Priskin penalty that the former Watford and Ipswich forward had won with what appeared to be a dive.

That the travesty was played out in the Ferenc Puskas Stadium only made it worse: 60 years ago, Hungary lost a World Cup final they probably should have won and now, so absolute has been their collapse, their squad for Saturday’s game includes only three players who play in the top 10 leagues in Europe according to Uefa’s coefficient. And it is fair to say that even those three – Hamburg’s Zoltan Stieber, Hoffenheim’s Adam Szalai and Dinamo Moscow’s Balazs Dzsudzsak – would not have got anywhere near the Golden Squad of the 1950s. A 2-1 home defeat to Northern Ireland in their first qualifier hardly bodes well.

Romania, by contrast, started with a 1-0 win over Claudio Ranieri’s Greece and, while this squad are nowhere near as gifted as the team that reached the World Cup quarter-finals 20 years ago, they have realistic hopes of qualifying for their first major tournament since Euro 2008. That was their first appearance at a major tournament since Euro 2000. Linking those two qualifications and this campaign is one man: Satan …

An unnervingly macabre sight

The road is narrow, cut into the hillside, its surface stones and mud baked by the sun. On the way out of Craiova, we had passed the odd donkey-drawn cart and a couple of kids on battered old bikes, and then, when we had left the town centre far behind, there appeared on the horizon a smudge of dust. As we drew closer, it became apparent that it was a column of people, maybe 200 strong, at the head of which, sombrely swinging a thurible, strode a priest, dressed entirely in black. As we slowed and passed to one side, the procession opened out, and I saw, lying flat on his back on a low wooden trailer, another priest, huge, black-robed, grey-bearded and very obviously dead.

Given where I was headed, it was an unnervingly macabre sight. We went on to Dorobantia and specifically to the small cemetery that is dominated by a bronze statue outside of the tombs. It depicts a footballer, moustache and haircut dating him to the 1970s, left arm crooked across his chest, right arm straining backwards, as though to steady himself for a surge on to his right foot. Alongside the statue stands the tomb, the size of a small house, marked on one corner with a plaque reading “Ap. 20” – the number of the apartment in which he had lived in Craiova.

This is Florin Piturca, who was a well-respected striker for the second division side Drobeta-Turnu Severin when he died suddenly in December 1978, the evening after scoring in his side’s 2-1 victory over Metalul Bucharest.

His father, Maximilian, a local cobbler, was distraught, and spent what little money he had in establishing a lasting monument to his son. The night Florin was buried, Maximilian stayed in the tomb. He went on sleeping there every night until his death in 1994. “That was my husband’s house,” Florin’s mother, Vasilica, said. “He worked every day, and every night he went to the cemetery to sleep by his son in the mausoleum.” He is now buried alongside him.

Vasilica is certain her son died after being given performance-enhancing drugs; she believes he was used as a guinea pig before the stimulants were given to higher-profile players.

Florin’s cousin, Victor, was an even better footballer than he was. Victor won five Romanian league titles with Steaua, as well as the European Cup in 1986. Nicknamed Satan, he tends to wear black and his car registration number is 666. In club management, his record is modest – just one league title won, and that back in 2001 with Steaua. But on each previous occasion he has managed them, Piturca has qualified Romania for a European Championship – although following a disagreement with Gheorghe Hagi, he was sacked before Euro 2000.

Piturca has not ruled out Al Ittihad move

Promising as the Greece game was, Pituca may not make it to Euro 2016 either. He turned down an offer to take over at the Saudi club al-Ittihad last month, but seemingly only because they refused to pay his contract-release clause and he didn’t want to have to pay it himself. Piturca has made little attempt to hide the frostiness of his relationship with Razvan Burleanu, the 30-year-old who was elected president of the FRF in March, the day after the favourite to land the role, Gica Popescu, was convicted of money-laundering and tax evasion and sentenced to three years in jail. Piturca has not ruled out the al-Ittihad move, saying the door to negotiation is still open. Burleanu, for his part, says he has a Plan B should Piturca go.

He is there for now, though, and has created a stir by recalling to the team Lucian Sanmartean. He is 34 and hugely talented, but has been restricted to just seven caps largely because of his attitude. His return, though, has created great excitement, with overblown comparisons to the return of Hagi in 1999. He is likely to start as a creative midfielder, while the decision on who starts at centre-forward could also make waves. Ciprian Marica, the captain, is suspended after being sent off against Greece, meaning Piturca must choose between Bogdan Stancu, Raul Rusescu and Claudiu Keseru.

Keseru has been in tremendous form for Steaua this season, scoring six in one game against Pandurii and a hat-trick in the Europa League against Aalborg. He is also half-Hungarian. He doesn’t speak Hungarian, though, and has insisted he feels entirely Romanian.

Whether Hungarian fans, who on Wednesday released a logo proclaiming Bucharest to be “a Hungarian village”, treat him like any other Romanian, though, remains to be seen. It promises to be feisty.