Walter Smith’s two-word Rangers scouting report on Red Star that left Graeme Souness stunned

The late, great, Walter Smith was not often a man lost for words - whether that be inspiring his players in the dressing room or giving Chick Young the sharp side of his tongue after an ill-advised question.

It's also fair to say that the man who won 10 league titles as Rangers manager and took a side featuring Filip Sebo and Kirk Broadfoot to the 2008 UEFA Cup final held a belief his side could beat anyone.

Those traits, combined with a deep knowledge of the game, are probably why Ibrox boss Graeme Souness sent his assistant to Serbia to scout Red Star ahead of a European Cup meeting between the two sides in 1991.

Smith duly went off to the Marakana to compile his report before returning to Scotland for to present his findings.

They were, according to legend, brief and to the point. Two words, in fact. "We're f*****d".

By some accounts a baffled Souness followed up by asking for more detail, with Smith elaborating with the words "Graeme, we're absolutely f****d".

The story is almost certainly embellished but in the days before Wyscout, with the secretive Slobodan Milosevic regime still holding sway in Yugoslavia the Scottish contingent wouldn't have had much of an idea of what they were about to face.

What Smith would have been greeted with when he was despatched to compile his report was a team at the peak of its powers, which would go on to score 88 goals in 34 games to win the Yugoslav top flight.

A team featuring the likes of Robert Prosinecki, Vladimir Jugovic, Dejan Savicevic, Darko Pancev and a young Sinisa Mihajlovic.

A team which would, by the following summer, be European champion.

In the modern day players of that talent would be plucked from Serbian football before their 21st birthdays, but back then