Empty stadium - full pants.

Coz I’m KAKING myself with excitement!!

Yeah, okay, I’m kaking myself full stop. We’re having a dodgy time domestically. We struggle against Clyde, we get stuffed by Hibs, we barely show up at Tynecastle. And now we’re facing one of the richest clubs on the planet with some of the most capable players currently strutting their stuff on the same globe. Yup - my bricking it is partly down to the very real possibility that, in our second Champions League match of 2005/2006, The Teds could be well and truly murdered .

But, in all honesty, most of the tumultuous tremors in my thunderous tummy stem not from terror but tremendously tantalising anticipation. The Gers against Internazionale of Milan - this IS what it’s all about.

Games like this are why you want to be in The Champions League. These are the kind of ties which, when you look back on your days as a Bear or Bearette, have the ability to make you forget all the domestic stuff which surrounded them. I can easily find out who we played either side of the trips to Monaco, Munich, Turin, Marseille - the yearbooks and programmes are all sat in front of me as I type - but, off the top of my head, I mostly don’t recall.

I know we beat Monaco in the Stade Louis II. I remember Gio’s daisy-cutter shot into the bottom of their net. I remember how early we scored. I remember Tugay at sweeper. I remember us defending for our lives. I remember going through three hands’ worth of fingernails as we held on. I remmber who was in my house that night, the type of telly I watched it on, the chair I sat in and how high I jumped at the final whistle. Did we lose or win in the weekend games either side of that night? No idea. I know we didn’t win the league that season - but this, like Durrant’s tunnleed shot in Marseiiles, Jorg’s Hammer shot late on in Eindhoven and Huistra’s tuck-in in Brugge, was a memory we could warm ourselves around.

Not so the return match. But I cannae remember much about who we played either side of the 2-2 Ibrox draw with the Monagasques. Even bad Champions Lleague games are more memorable than most SPL wins.

All I want Rangers to do in Milan this week is to avoid what happened against Juventus, home and away, and what happened in the Amstrerdam Arena against Ajax. Some defeats are so bad thta even the glitz and glam of sharing a pitch with such ilustrious opponents is curled up into a concrete ball of pain which doesn’t leave yer gut for years. You want to mix it with the big boyz? You want to show the world that you are one of the big boyz? Then ths is the chance you take. I remember every Champions League game we’ve ever played - every score, every scorer, every part of the ground I sat in or part of the house I watched it from. When ye take a thumping, that’s a down side.

And, eeeh-bah-gum, when the good times happen, it’s WORTH IT!

Inter? I see them live, on average, once every decade. First Euro match I ever attended was 21 years ago and it was the Blue and Black men from the San Siro. The lust for continental competition was always within me but that night, at The Brox, it began its total consumption of my being.

Allesandro Altobelli, who’d scored in the previous World Cup final, scored to make it 1-1 on the night and 4-1 to Inter on aggregate. We then came back to lead 3-1 but Karl-Heinz Rummenigge - who’d score in the next World Cup final -strolled up the pitch, Dave McPherson and John Mclelland trying to track him, and rattled the ball off our bar. It was a warning of what would come of we tried to get too close to that aggregate lead.

In 94/95 we were due to go to the San Siro to face Milan in the pre-drawn CL Group stages. But AEK Athens had other ideas and so my mate and I went to the Italian fashion capital anyway. We attended the Milan derby in November 1994 - the European Cup holders versus the UEFA Cup holders. Baresi and Bergomi went for two seperate 50-50s. They won one each. Paolo Maldidni scored and the game finished 1-1. And I remember Pagliuca, the Inter goalie that Lombardy Sunday night, walking among the fireworks and flares on the pitch as if the Milan Curva could do nothing to intimidate him.

Eleven years on and the Inter Curva managed to hit the Milan keeper at the other end of the same stadium and so The Rangers play in an empty San Siro. It almost feels like a slight. Just as it was in the fifties when “AC” moved their formality of a second leg to another tiny Milanese stadium when they played The Gers in the old European Cup.

This season I’ll see Inter for a third time but it wont be in the San Siro - that TEMPLE of calcio, that leitmotif of Champions League football, that home of all that is monumental about the continental game. It’s a place of such grandeur that even empty, save for a few corporate types and officials, it should inspire The Gers to another level.

This is where our only possible advantage comes in - that Inter will find the empty seats only depressing while we can find the stadium itself inspiring. There’s that and the fact our feet will be firmly on the ground - the events of last Saturday and the underperforming on the home front will ensure Rangers don’t go in there pretending they can give Adriano, Figo, Samuel and co a game unless we perform out of our skins.

But The Rangers players who have struggled in Scotland this season - who we’ll be able to hear swearing their heids off on the telly! - should remember one thing: They can now make everyone forget.