Smith joy at revitalised Gers

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Tuesday night's victory - secured thanks to goals by Lee McCulloch, Daniel Cousin and DaMarcus Beasley - built on the three points harvested from the 2-1 success against Stuttgart a fortnight ago.

They are now joint top of Group E and have an excellent chance of progressing to the knockout stages for the second time in three years, and Smith said: "We have a new team, and we were wondering how they would fare away from home after an excellent result in the first game. We are delighted with them, we defended well and came away with an excellent result."

He added: "When you look at the group, I don't think we fooled anyone by saying Barcelona were out-and-out favourites to win it and that the results between the rest of the teams were going to be critical.

"So we have got off to a very good start. We have shown that we can compete at this level, and that is important because we are a new team. For us, this away game was an important one to see if the team could play in the manner they ended up playing."

Rangers are level on six points with Barcelona, who continued their 100% start to the tournament by winning 2-0 in Stuttgart, and they face each other in back-to-back games next.

Smith's side may struggle against the Spanish giants, but that is for another day. For the moment, Smith is happy to feast on what was arguably the greatest European night in the club's history.

"I think it's probably our biggest (European) result in terms of the number of goals we scored away for home," he said.

"I don't think we could have imagined for a minute coming away to a club as strong as Lyon and managing to win 3-0. I don't think anyone expected that so I am delighted with what happened.

"It was an excellent result for us. We had to work extremely hard for it, so everyone is delighted that the hard work got us the result in the end."