By Chick Young BBC Scotland football correspondent

Rangers suffered a miserable defeat in Lithuania

Rangers thought they could just about shoehorn themselves into the next round of the Champions' League qualifiers, but all they could do was produce a load of old cobblers.

In truth their woeful performance in Kaunas was as decrepit and crumbled as the Lithuanian football slum in which Vladimir Romanov's former wee diddy team became his first love again.

Good luck to Kaunas as they edge ever nearer to the Champions' League, but if that ground is worthy of hosting European football then let's hold the British Grand Prix on the road from Cockbridge to Tomintoul.

I've said this before but I make no apologies for repeating myself. There seems to be one rule for British teams in Europe and one rule for the rest.

Queen of the South are forced to flit to Airdrie for their Uefa Cup encounter but compared that heap of rubble in the Baltic, Palmerston is the Taj Mahal.

MY SPORT: DEBATE Give your reaction to Chick's latest column

But if you want to talk architecture then the team that Walter Smith has built has the look of a condemned Glasgow multi-storey about it.

A thing of beauty? They are the equivalent of a bus shelter with the glass kicked in.

Out of Europe before the domestic season even kicks off? How the mighty have fallen. Manchester must seem like an interplanetary journey away.

It was a miserable performance and the players looked as if they could not have found a team-mate with a pass with the aid of sat-nav and an identikit picture of what the other blokes in the dressing room look like.

His loyalty to players who look like the cast of 'Last of the Summer Wine' irks supporters who think they know best. Maybe they do.

Their season hasn't just made a false start - their battery is so flat you could slide it under a door.

Here's the truth. Rangers were living a fantasy existence last season traversing Europe on a wing and a prayer - the Indiana Jones of the game.

They explored new territories and made it up as they went along.

Kaunas was their day of reckoning. And I know what the fans reckon now. That the voice of the people is right and that Walter Smith has got it horribly, dreadfully wrong.

And there will be a price to pay. Like, for example, saying adios to Carlos Cuellar�

The manager's tactics, his signings - in particular Kenny Miller - and his loyalty to players who look like the cast of 'Last of the Summer Wine' irks supporters who think they know best. Maybe they do.

But I remain in the manager's gang. Just as I believed in Gordon Strachan after the Celtic lynch mob wanted him hung, drawn and quartered in the heat of a Bratislavan night.

Kaunas was Rangers' Artmedia, a roasting on a summer evening on a foreign field where the opposition should have been put the sword with a swagger and a smile.

But three consecutive championships later, the fugitive lives on in some style.

Rangers were about as useful as a cat-flap in an aeroplane in Lithuania. But don't think the manager doesn't know that. Walter Smith hasn't lost the plot, just a football match.