But the Ibrox faithful are sure to balk at the Spanish defender's reading of a campaign that promised much but ended with Rangers missing their main targets.

Celtic edged them for the title on Thursday evening, capping a sour eight days which began with the loss of the UEFA Cup final the previous midweek. Yet Cuellar still believes it his side and not Celtic who enjoyed the better season.

"I think it has been a great year for the club," he says. "We won the CIS Cup, got to the UEFA final, the Scottish Cup final and took the league to the last day of the season. We've had a much better season than Celtic. They didn't get to the final of the CIS Cup or the Scottish Cup, or to a European final."

It was nearly a great season for Rangers. Denied a first European trophy in 36 years, the club's supporters would now swap their lot across the past ten months for the solitary piece of silverware currently residing at Celtic Park. The three years the Ibrox side have been separated from the championship is their longest barren spell without the flag since the dark days between 1979 and 1986.

Cuellar is on more solid ground in providing the indisputable reason why this is so. Or the 12 reasons. That is the number of games Rangers contested following their UEFA Cup quarter-final win over Sporting Lisbon that ended with their final league game defeat at Aberdeen three days ago. In chasing honours on four fronts, Rangers were stretched to the point where they snapped.

"If it hadn't been for this last series of game, if we hadn't been involved in all those competitions, I feel confident we'd have won the league... and it would have been by a number of points. We wouldn't have had to take it right to the end of the season," Cuellar said.

"Two games a week is fine because that normally leaves two or three days to recover and I'm quite happy with that. But four games a week is not good physically.

"It was one of the main reasons we lost the league. It is crazy to be playing 68 games. Quite incredible. It's crazy, really almost impossible."

Such craziness was brought about by the Ibrox men's desperation to become the first Rangers side to claim a quadruple. Progressing to a European final fatally undermined their title challenge because it forced them to embark on a breathless fixture schedule that suffocated the life out of them.

There are parallels with Celtic's Seville season of 2003, but also significant differences. Martin O'Neill's men never had the game pile-up Rangers were forced to endure. Neither, however, were the penalties for losing the league so potentially severe. The backdrop meant Celtic supporters were willing to trade a goal difference title success by Rangers for a first European final in 33 years. They had won the title in the previous two seasons. With Henrik Larsson heading up the club's most accomplished crop of players in three decades, the suspicion was they would do so again the following year. Not least because Rangers were then in a financial pickle that forced them to sell their treble-winning captain Barry Ferguson. A record 25-game winning league run by O'Neill's side in 2003-4 confirmed the suspicions were well founded.

The situation is altogether different for the Ibrox club. Their UEFA Cup final appearance last week extracted a price that wasn't worth paying. The violence surrounding the Manchester showpiece means it will be an occasion the club can never reflect on with any real satisfaction. If not for Rangers overcoming Sporting, they would certainly have closed out the championship.

As was not the case five years ago, the team that sneaked the title because their rivals were distracted by Europe will be able to outspend their challengers to prevent another close shave next season. Helped, in no small part, by the £10m bounty that automatic entry to the Champions League group stages guarantees. Rangers manager Walter Smith won't say his team's UEFA Cup run was a curse. But he is sure to believe that.

"I think the season turned for us last Wednesday in the UEFA Cup final," he says. "You look back on a season and think what do you do? You can't play to lose, you lose often enough without trying. During the run-in, around the UEFA quarter-final, we saw we would be faced with a hell of a number of fixtures and knew then it would be extremely difficult.

"So to have got to the last day of all the competitions we've been involved in has been a big thing for us. But I did think it would be awkward for us. After our initial bedding-in period of the season, we went on a run of 27 games without losing, which set us up for more opportunities than I would have imagined in our first full season. After that, despite being confronted with so many games, we've managed to keep ourselves at a reasonable level so we would still qualify for the final and so on. But it has affected out results.

"Our form has been up and down since that 27-game run. We have dropped vital points after the last lot of European matches. After the first leg against Fiorentina, we lost at Celtic Park. After the second leg, we dropped two points at Easter Road and after the final we dropped two points at Motherwell. That's been a circumstance we haven't handled well and it was difficult trying to play four games in ten days.

"After the Champions League campaign, if you'd looked only domestically, it would have cleared the way, but if that would have been good enough to win the league I don't know. Nobody knows."

To the despair of Rangers, we all do know. Only too well.