My Rangers night with 007 as I tasted Champions League high life with Sean Connery - Kenny Miller

Everyone associates the Champions League with glitz and glamour. And I got a taste of that as a young player at Rangers – even when I WASN’T playing. For our group game against Monaco in September 2000, myself and Peter Lovenkrands didn’t make the match-day squad. The current gaffer Gio van Bronckhorst scored the winning goal for us that night.

But while we sat in the stand, the chairman David Murray called us over. Because I was a fellow Edinburgh boy, he wanted to introduce me to his friend. It was only 007 himself, Sir Sean Connery. David told him I was one of the club’s up and coming talents. Meeting James Bond in Monte Carlo? It doesn’t get much more glamorous than that, does it?

And on the pitch, Europe’s top competition doesn’t disappoint either. Incredibly, I managed to score in my first Champions League game for Rangers – and also my last. For the Monaco return at Ibrox, there was a clamour for me to start. I had just scored FIVE in one game against St Mirren in the league – but you could never be sure with Dick Advocaat as gaffer.

I actually remember one of the newspaper headlines in the build-up. It was something like, ‘Oh no, he’s not starting Kenny’. With a picture of the South Park character next to it.

I had been in Champions League squads before but hadn’t even made the bench – like the night I met Sir Sean. So to actually start, to stand at Ibrox hearing that music before kick off – the hairs are standing up on the back of my neck just thinking about it.

It’s sensational. And unbelievably, I scored after TWO minutes. Arthur Numan put an up-and-under cross into the box and it somehow found its way to me.

I didn’t strike it perfectly but it took a deflection past the keeper. That feeling was something