Before the major European football match at the Giuseppe Sinigaglia Stadium, there was the small, very small, Europe, at the Giuseppe Sinigaglia Stadium. Como’s last European campaign (before the one kicking off this evening against RB Leipzig in the Champions League) took place forty-six years ago in what was, for well over a decade, the most important European club competition – the Mitropa Cup – though even then it was a scaled-down and rather uninteresting version of the great cup it once was. So uninteresting, in fact, that it didn’t even merit a brief mention in the Corriere della Sera. And this was certainly not due to a lack of interest in the lakeside city: the paper was reporting on the ‘100-mile motorboat race on Lake Como’.The Mitropa Cup, once a competition featuring the strongest teams in Central Europe (the league champions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy and Hungary – at the time, excluding England, the strongest nations in football, ed.), had become a tournament for the second-division champions of Czechoslovakia, Italy, Yugoslavia and Hungary. In the 1980–1981 edition, Como were among these teams, competing in only their third European campaign in the club’s history.The first two were contested in what was then the Italian-French Friendship Cup, an invitational but official tournament in which Italian teams faced an equal number of French teams in a two-legged tie. The aggregate of the various results determined whether the cup was awarded to the Italian Football Federation or the French Football Federation (in 1962 it became a knockout tournament; in 1964 it disappeared from the calendar).The 1980–1981 Mitropa Cup was the major new event in Como. It offered an opportunity to watch that young, talented and ambitious team on six occasions.A year earlier, they had pulled off a surprise victory in Serie B, a competition that was expected to be a contest between Brescia, the ambitious Sampdoria under their new president Mantovani (the man who would later lead the Blucerchiati to the Scudetto) and the newly relegated Atalanta and Lanerossi Vicenza. Over the course of the year, however, Italian football discovered that Villiam Vecchi was not a finished goalkeeper, that Pietro Vierchowood was an excellent defender and Simone Fontolan was every bit as good, that Massimo Mancini really was the talent everyone had been raving about in Florence a few years earlier, that Doriano Pozzato was a rather good winger and that Marco Nicoletti and Ezio Cavagnetto worked together beautifully. And, above all, that Nils Liedholm was right to regard Pippo Marchiorio, the Como manager, as “one of the most intelligent and well-prepared managers of the new generation”. In Serie A, the young players Roberto Galia, Stefano Maccoppi and Luca Fusi were also brought into the first team – three players who went on to enjoy long careers in the top flight.The Mitropa Cup got off to a good start, in a “festive and cheerful” city and in a stadium “packed beyond the maximum permitted capacity”, wrote La Provincia, the Como-based daily newspaper. Marchioro’s team won 2–0 against Nogometni Klub Zagreb thanks to goals from Doriano Pozzato and Pietro Vierchowood.The Croatian side were considered the favourites. They turned out to be the least well-prepared and finished bottom. Como did reasonably well. They won three matches, drew one and lost two. They finished the mini-league on 7 points, level with Tatran Presov and Csepel SC, but came third on goal difference.Few people on Lake Como remember that little corner of Europe, made up of obscure teams and players with unlikely names. Emilio Riva does remember it, however – a teacher of Italian and Latin at the classical grammar school for almost forty years, and a scholar of local customs, traditions and history, whom we had already heard from at the start of this season. He returned from the away match in Zagreb in high spirits, despite the defeat, but with the name and telephone number of the woman who would become his wife. Etched in his memory were the few shots and the many dribbles of Marijan Cercek, the man who, a dozen years earlier, had driven the Fiorentina defence to despair in the Fairs Cup (1968–1969 season) and prompted Bruno Pesaola to say, ‘This bloke is a phenomenon for the ages’. Perhaps Pesaola exaggerated, but he wasn’t wrong: when he was training and living the life of an athlete, Marijan Cercek really was one of the finest right wingers in Europe. The problem was that this only happened a few times a year.