Manager and captain. No dressing room is together unless that relationship is right. In an Ibrox lounge last Thursday, Barry Ferguson, the Rangers skipper, was asked about Walter Smith, the man he simply calls the gaffer. Almost on cue, Smith passed through the same room en route to a televi-sion interview in the stands. Ferguson, spying him at once, jokingly turned deliberately fulsome in his praise. “He’s the best in the country,” he laughed at a volume he was sure Smith could hear. Once out of earshot, the question to Ferguson to sum up his manager was repeated. Tellingly, in more serious tones, so was the answer. “Nah, he’s the best,” shrugged Ferguson. “What more can I say?”

He could always tell us how he compares to the last one, but that story is familiar enough. Ferguson’s personality could hardly have clashed more dramatically with that of Paul Le Guen, Smith’s predecessor. A long battle of wills eventually became an outright war. David Murray, the Rangers chairman, sided with the player, although only after Le Guen took the armband away from Ferguson and put him on the transfer list. Smith’s first decision was whether to restore Ferguson to the captaincy. He didn’t hesitate.

Le Guen promised a new Rangers, but most of the club’s support and its hierarchy preferred the old one, a team led on and off the field by those grounded in its traditions, where beating Celtic to the title comes first. Even amid an unlikely run to the Uefa Cup final, the mantra about the Premier League mattering most hasn’t changed. Asked what would be most special, a European trophy with victory over Zenit St Petersburg in Manchester on Wednesday, or regaining the championship from Celtic, Ferguson was categoric. “Winning the league,” he said. “That’s what was set as a target at the start of the season.”

He paused and grinned. “I wouldn’t knock back the Uefa Cup. I’d be disappointed not to win it, but we want to win everything. I wouldn’t be happy with two trophies, say the CIS Cup and the Uefa Cup, I want to win all four [league title, Uefa Cup, Scottish Cup and League Cup]. All the players think the same.”

How can a club with so many league titles prioritise that over adding to its single European success, the 1972 Cup Winners’ Cup? Every player who started that game has been inducted into the club’s Hall of Fame, and Ferguson was urged to celebrate that history growing up as a Rangers fan. He has arguably never been involved in a bigger game than the one in Manchester, but that still doesn’t mean he wants it more than anything.

Scotland can be a parochial place and there are some Rangers fans whose greatest pleasure in reaching Manchester is an eventual rebuttal to any lingering Celtic boasts about their own Uefa Cup final in Seville five years ago.

When Smith succeeded Le Guen in January last year, his arrival was presented as a return to concentrating on the Premier League and his squad, primarily, has been built for domestic use, with a move back to basics to confront the problem of Celtic winning consecutive titles under Gordon Strachan. Europe wasn’t scheduled yet, certainly not a journey like this one.

Smith has built a new team with Ferguson as his starting point. “I reasoned that if there was a problem between Barry Ferguson and Paul Le Guen it was finished with when I took over,” said Smith. “Different managers have different views on certain aspects. Barry had captained Rangers previously and done so successfully, so it was right to ask him to continue as captain. I’ve no regrets about that decision. Seeing the way our team plays at the moment, the thing we have is togetherness. Regardless of whether lads are Scottish, Bosnian, American, whatever, within the group we all work together.”

When Rangers exited the Champions League with a 3-0 home reverse to Lyon, the Uefa Cup was a consolation, even an inconvenience. They have since conceded just twice in eight matches in the tournament, resulting in some accusations they are too negative to deserve a place in the final. Smith, initially dismayed at this, has started to indulge in some self-deprecating humour about the jibe. In midweek, he quipped after a 1-0 league win at home over Motherwell watched by Dick Advocaat, that the Zenit manager formerly in charge at Ibrox would have learned nothing tactically because Rangers played “too many forwards”.

This is Rangers’ 19th European fixture of the season, but the number of games doesn’t worry Ferguson. The number of tickets for the next one does, though. Each Rangers first-team player has been allocated between 15 and 20 tickets for Manchester. “I’ve got a busload going down, but I’ve not got enough tickets. I’ve not told half of them that yet,” said Ferguson. “They might have to get in a boozer and watch it. I’m finding that aspect hard just now. It’s impossible, I can’t get tickets for everyone. Even my father-in-law [a Celtic fan] was wanting to go, believe it or not, I had to talk him out of it. He’d have got pelted.”