SAY the phrase ‘Battle of Britain’ to any self-respecting football fan of the 1990s and it won’t be Spitfires and Messerschmitts which spring to mind.

Such a financial chasm has grown between the Scottish and English top flights that it may be difficult for a child of the noughties to fully grasp the sense of excitement and anticipation which accompanied the champions of those two divisions, Rangers and Leeds United, going head-to-head in the second round of the 1992-93 European Cup.

A titanic struggle which more than lived up to its billing, today is the 25th anniversary of a breathless first leg at Ibrox.

A formative year where the landscape of European football was still being shaped, it will be hard too for some to get their head round the fact that this was the first season of the FA Premier League, freshly backed to the tune of a game-changing £304m by BskyB. At stake, in addition to the usual Scotland-England bragging rights, was a place in the first-ever Champions League group stages, a select band comprising just eight teams.

If the Ibrox side’s progress to this point was relatively straightforward – the fourth of their nine league titles in a row had been secured by nine points over Hearts, with a 3-0 aggregate win over Danish side Lyngby following in the first round of this competition – the same could hardly be said for Leeds United. Victors in the final season of the old first division before the top 22 clubs resigned en masse for this brave new future, a very un-Teutonic administrative error by Stuttgart manager Christoph Daum saw them playing a third match in an eerily empty Nou Camp. Goals from Strachan and Carl Shutt later, and it was game on. “It was surreal circumstances,” then Leeds manager Howard Wilkinson recalled to SportTimes. “There were about 10,000 in the ground, about 9,900 of which were Leeds supporters.”

All roads then led to Glasgow. And the tunnel at Ibrox. A kind of noise which was only amplified by the decision, taken after meetings between police and officials, to impose an away-fan ban on both legs of the tie. “Elland Road at that time was a cauldron but there is just something about the construction of that stadium,” recalls Wilkinson. “I don’t know whether they knew it when they were building it, but the acoustics were brilliant. Even compared to Wembley, it was an amphitheatre, a proper away ground. You felt you were in Rome.”

And then silence. Utter, abrupt silence. Howard Wilkinson had “never known anything like it”. The hush marked a stunning Gary McAllister volley which sped past Andy Goram with such ferocity that it cracked straight off the stanchion and bounced back out. “That silence was surreal,” recalled John Brown. “There was so much noise coming out of the tunnel at Ibrox that you couldn’t hear the guy behind you, let alone the guy ten yards in front. So when it was suddenly silenced, it was like a wake. You just couldn’t believe it. But we were able to fight back. We always were, that year. Whenever teams scored against us, they knew we were coming back at them. Because we did it on a weekly basis, game by game.”

It always helps, of course, when you get a helping hand from a goalkeeper. John Lukic, an experienced figure, who had started the move for Michael Thomas’s last gasp goal at Anfield in Arsenal’s 1989 league win, mis-judged a corner and it was game on. “There was a problem on a corner,” said Wilkinson, “and John Lukic might not admit it, but I think he threw it in.” When Ally McCoist latched onto a Dave MacPherson knock-down, the Ibrox side had a lead to take to Elland Road.

Rangers were behind enemy lines now this was the kind of team which revelled in it. “Nothing feared us,” recalled Brown. “When you are involved in Old Firm matches and you can play in those games without being overawed then you can play in any game. Leeds United’s stadium was like our back yard, it didn’t intimidate us at all. They played Eye of the Tiger, the Rocky tune, beforehand and we turned round to see Ian Durrant shadowboxing their centre half, Chris Fairclough, in the tunnel. It was all about psychology.

“We were laughing because we could see they had fear in their eyes, even in the tunnel at Ibrox. It was something Walter [Smith] and even the previous manager Graeme Souness had said. He said ‘stare them out and if they can’t hold your gaze then that is half the battle’.”

But there was magic, not just machismo, on show that night, as Mark Hateley and Ally McCoist grabbed a sublime away goal each. “I had seen Mark Hateley play loads of games, especially in England squads and Under-21 squads,” Wilkinson recalled. “He pulls one out of the bag which can only be described as world class – chest, half turn, volley, I think it was about 30 yards, whoosh. Then they did us on the counter and it was Goodnight Vienna.”

John Brown remembers the aftermath as vividly as the match itself. He claims Gordon Strachan and Gary McAllister took the defeat badly enough to walk off without shaking hands, while Rangers were acclaimed by the rest of Elland Road. “I think they had been over-confident,” said Brown. “And I think that was proved at the end of the second game when both Scots lads ran off the park without shaking hands.”

There was the fact that one of the first men who met them when they came off field and back into the away dressing room was a certain Sir Alex Ferguson. “He was as happy as Walter or Archie, because he had worked with them both, and he was a proud Scot who loved to see Scots not being downtrodden in the press down south,” said Brown. ”Which they had done, they had written us off. So that just drove us on.”

There was going to the stadium’s Club Bar or players’ lounge to phone his dad, and sharing a drink with Eric Cantona - who had scored a second leg consolation - David Rocastle, and Rocastle’s friend, or ‘minder’, actor Denis Waterman. Brown duly ended up with Cantona’s jersey, at least until he auctioned it off for charity. “They said the win was well deserved. Six months later he [Cantona] was signed for a million quid and the rest is history.”

The celebrations didn’t end there. Garrisoned at the Holiday Inn near Manchester Airport, Smith said the night was theirs – so long as they were on the bus back north at 7.30am the following morning. As for their recommendation for a Manchester night spot for the occasion, it came from a few young men about town. “We went to nightclub that night and met the Class of ’92 – the likes [Ryan] Giggs, Scholes and the Nevilles were all out that evening.”

For all the jubilation, it was back to the serious stuff soon enough. “We had Celtic on the Saturday but we never trained again until we warmed up at Celtic Park on the Saturday,” said Brown. “We just rested physically, mentally. And Durrant scored the winner.”

Finding Group A with Marseille, Club Bruges and CSKA Moscow, Rangers went close in that inaugural Champions League season and might have gone closer still - believes Brown - had Hateley and McCoist been able to take to the field together for either of their two draws against eventual winners Marseille. Hateley later claimed to have received a phone call telling him to miss the second of those two matches - he was subsequently suspended anyway - but Rangers made a mark that year that lives on in any case.

“On the Champions League badge there are eight stars,” said Brown, “and that signifies the first year of the Champions League. So while Rangers aren’t in the Champions League right now they really are, as one of those eight stars. That is our legacy.”