Otherworldly Rangers atmosphere led Saint-Gilloise to YouTube as Ibrox noise blows Champions League rivals away

Christian Burgess doesn’t take it personally.

Only a couple of years ago he had absolutely no idea who Union Saint-Gilloise were either. So the former Portsmouth stopper can hardly play the offended card if there were Rangers fans out there punching the air in delight when the Belgian minnows were paired with their team in this season’s Champions League qualifiers.

Yes, Union may have come close to pulling off one of European football’s greatest-ever fairytales last season when they came back from 48 years in lower league obscurity to come within a play-off run of the Belgian title. But with Gio Van Bronckhorst busy heading to a Europa League final in Seville at the time and Celtic clinching the Scottish Premiership, very few fans in this country even had time or the inclination to look up and take notice.

“It’s like the English isn’t it? We’re the same,” smiles Burgess when it’s put to him that Union’s heroic efforts might have gone largely unnoticed in Rangers’ backyard. I must be honest, I hadn’t even heard of Union before they reached out to me a couple of years ago so it’s pretty normal if the Rangers fans don’t know much about us.

“They’ll know about the bigger clubs in Belgium but we’re pretty small in comparison to the likes of Brugge and Anderlecht. We do have our own history but all of it was created more than a century ago!”

In fact, Union’s 11 top-flight titles makes them the third most successful Belgian side of all time behind Brugge and Anderlecht. That they were all won between the years of 1904 and 1935 is merely a minor detail in the remarkable phoenix-from-the-ashes rise which has been developing in the leafy suburb of Brussels over these last 24 months.

Burgess picks up the story: “Around 10 years