They reckoned that about 100,000 supporters had travelled to Manchester yesterday, and with good reason. It is not often you get to see a miracle in the 21st century and Rangers reaching the Uefa Cup final was up there with feeding the five thousand. Never has so little gone such a long way in European football, either.

A giant banner at one end of the City of Manchester Stadium had exhorted Rangers to make history. As what? The worst team to win a European competition? And before the e-mails start, that estimation came from a Scottish journalist.

It is easy to be cynical, but it was a testament to Walter Smith that he had guided Rangers so far with a team of the old (38-year-old David Weir), the borrowed (Steven Davis, on loan from Fulham) as well as the true blue, like Barry Ferguson.

That defeat was waiting at the end of the road was far less surprising than Rangers making it to the final in the first place. The Uefa Cup might be a deformed competition, a messy dumping ground for Champions League rejects, but it has a decent pedigree of winner; Juande Ramos with his fine Seville side (twice), Rafael Benítez’s Valencia and José Mourinho’s FC Porto just from the past six editions. Zenit St Petersburg were no mugs.

Smith’s Rangers were not in their league and, watching from the stands last night, David Moyes, the Everton manager, must have been cursing his side’s failure to go beyond the quarter-finals. Victorious over Zenit earlier this season, they would have expected to beat Rangers with a bit to spare.

But it was Rangers who were here last night and so, in Manchester city centre, was most of Glasgow to see the club’s first European final in 36 years, even if that meant watching in pubs and bars. At Ibrox, where the game was being beamed live on to a giant screen, the club had been forced to close the gates at 5.30pm, with 25,000 supporters inside and as many locked out.

It was a show of support that deserved a performance and Rangers, it might be said, gave everything that was expected of them. They had made it past Werder Bremen, Sporting Lisbon and Fiorentina with tactics that not even their own fans were ever going to describe as adventurous, so, while neutrals might have mocked the imbalance of a first half in which Zenit seemed to be setting records for possessional advantage, wizened Rangers observers were adamant that, at 0-0, everything was going nicely to plan. Taking the match to a penalty shoot-out definitely seemed their best chance.

Having tormented Steve McClaren’s England in the critical Euro 2008 qualifying match in Moscow, Andrei Arshavin’s pedigree was already well established. Rangers were relying on the more workmanlike virtues of Jean-Claude Darcheville, the striker who once passed briefly through Nottingham Forest.

Yet for all the sleight of foot of Zenit, they were finding a goal as hard to come by as all Rangers’ previous opponents. Even when Arshavin poked the ball past the stranded Neil Alexander, the Rangers goalkeeper, he spent a second too long sizing up how to find the net from 40 yards.

Raising the tempo after half-time, it looked for a brief period as though we might be about to see the greatest miracle of all. A goalmouth scramble, a penalty appeal — was Rangers’ rope-a-dope strategy going to pay off again? Not if Arshavin could do anything about it, and the little No 10, the classiest player on the pitch by a distance, provided the assist for Igor Denisov to end Rangers’ hopes. It was a tribute to their defensive doggedness that they restricted Zenit to a 2-0 margin.

“It gives more credibility to the game in Scotland, where some people like to suggest that the standard of play is not so high,” Smith had said of their appearance in the final. That was debatable after Rangers’ limitations were exposed, but it certainly gave more credibility to Smith, who had previously overachieved with Scotland by lifting them 70 places up the world rankings.

Now he has to lift his players to face four matches in a week, three of them away from home, as they attempt to take the Scottish league from Celtic (whom they trail by four points with two games in hand), concluding with the Scottish Cup final against Queen of the South. It will be a campaign of 68 games and ambitions of a quadruple had to be revised last night to a domestic treble. Not that they should be too disheartened. It was, as even Rangers fans will acknowledge, a miracle they had made it this far.