This curiosity surely says more about the latter's proneness to faltering than it does of their rivals' pretensions to contention for major honours.

Saints' lowly position in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League, indeed, merely confirms an uncertainty in Walter Smith's players which is threatening to become a harmful trend. Of the nine points Rangers have conceded this season, more than half have been dropped against opponents who, at the time, were in the bottom half of the table. In addition, all have been lost to statistically inferior teams, Rangers having won the only Old Firm fixture to have been played so far.

On this visit to the palatial home of their wealthy neighbours, St Mirren's 1-0 victory at Love Street last month seemed certain to be obliterated by a blizzard of goals when they fell two behind with the match barely ten minutes old. That the home fans should be nervously calling for the final whistle during a hectic and genuinely scary climax is an indicator of how close the long odds-on favourites came to sustaining further damage.

Smith's habitually stoical demeanour rarely betrays anxiety, but his words on this occasion revealed his acknowledgement of his players' occasional loss of conviction in matches in which periods of ascendancy and the exertion of pressure have failed to yield their expected rewards.

"It is frustrating," Smith admitted. "There have been a number of situations this season when we've had a lot of chances to kill off opponents and we haven't. We started very well in this one and got the two early goals. Even at the start of the second half, we were in control and again missed a number of chances.

"That encouraged St Mirren to be bolder, knowing they were still in it, and we finished up with Allan McGregor having to make a good save from a free kick to make sure of the victory. It would be worse, though, if we weren't making the chances."

Few, if any, Rangers supporters would have taken consolation from the creation of squandered opportunities had the Rangers goalkeeper not dived to his left to prevent that free kick from substitute Craig Dargo from giving the visitors an equaliser.

Nor would they have readily forgiven the misses by Kenny Miller which should have given their team a 4-0 lead long before St Mirren began the fightback which brought Franco Miranda's goal and led to that hectic finish. Criticism of the Scotland striker, however, would have been cruelly inappropriate.

Miller, paradoxically, both enjoyed and suffered one of those days which seem peculiar to him. His powerful, intelligent running and linking play were the principal sources of St Mirren's torment during Rangers' spells of virtually unchallenged authority. His perceptive passes set up both goals.

It was when Kris Boyd headed down Pedro Mendes's forward chip that Miller played the lay-off which sat up perfectly for Boyd to thunder a right-foot drive from 22 yards low to the left of goalkeeper Mark Howard. And, when Miller played a 1-2 with Kirk Broadfoot on the right, it was his impeccably-measured pass through the inside-right channel that let Steven Davis quite unmarked to rifle the ball into the far corner from eight yards.

It was the beauty of the construction and the expertise of the finishing of those goals which suggested Saints would leave Ibrox reddened by embarrassment. And it was, bewilderingly, Miller's profligacy which ensured that they did not.

When Miranda played a pass back to Howard that was obviously short the moment the ball left his foot, Miller darted into possession, took the ball past the goalkeeper and, from around six yards, contrived to chip it over the bar. Soon after, he would receive a low cut-back from Broadfoot and send his close-range shot against the underside of the bar.

When he saw the St Mirren left-back, Miranda, score with virtually his first venture into Rangers' half – a low, angled left-foot drive into the far corner after receiving Dargo's back-heeled pass – Miller would surely have concluded, like the rest of us, that he was cursed.

Some time before, the encouragement "to be bolder" to which Smith referred afterwards had been declared by St Mirren's manager, Gus MacPherson, when he sent on Dargo and Dennis Wyness, two strikers, in place of Billy Mehmet and midfielder Andy Dorman, switching from a 4-5-1 to a 4-4-2 formation that gave Rangers genuine anxieties in the closing 15 minutes.

"Our improvement later in the game came from passing the ball better, simple as that," said MacPherson. "The start of the game really destroyed us. Rangers basically scored with their first real attack and we rode our luck in the middle part of the match.

"But we came back into it by holding our nerve and passing better. That was our first goal in five matches, so it's obvious that our problem has been a lack of a cutting edge."

MacPherson was concerned by another problem, which is a fixtures arrangement that sees his team face back-to-back meetings with the Old Firm. "I think we need an explanation of how that's come about," he said. "A number of the lower clubs seem to play Celtic and Rangers in successive weeks.

"Yet Rangers played Falkirk on the opening day and don't play them again until January. How does that happen? I expect there's a reason for it. I can't see it just being a random thing."