It's sod's law as pitch fells Chelsea colossus

Yet none of that trio would have wished on Terry a fate more lonely than anything football can surely throw at you. When he walked up to the VIP box to collect his loser's medal, his eyes still hollow and red raw, the United players in their guard of honour could barely bring themselves to glance his way. "Everyone knew it could just have easily been them who'd missed," said Giggs. "Ronnie knew he could have been in the same position."

Indeed, in the agonised minutes after he had missed his kick, the Portuguese had reverted from being the swaggering best in the world - of which he gave us a pretty good impression in the first half - and become a lost little kid again. "I really thought we'd lost," he said.

Even when Edwin van der Sar finally made the save from Nicolas Anelka which sent the United players sprinting wildly from the halfway line to salute their Dutch keeper, Ronaldo was the only one not to join them. He stayed lying face down in the centre circle where he had been bawling his eyes out minutes earlier. It was as if, chastened by his own experience, he suddenly understood how something like this should never have happened to a man like Terry. This is why penalty shoot-outs should be dumped in Room 101 but the tales which they spin, of individual misery in a team setting, make them horribly compelling car crash viewing.

Surely not Terry, not our JT, every Chelsea fan cried; they knew he would take a miss like this harder and more personally than anyone else. Yes, Anelka went on to blow the decisive one but the skipper had spurned the one which should have brought the cup to London.

Naturally, not a soul would blame a man who, as Avram Grant said afterwards "is the main reason we are here", a soldier who has battled through six injuries this season, from a smashed cheekbone to a broken foot, to pilot Chelsea to Moscow.

Nobody was going to point a finger at a man who had been a rock, at one point in extra-time even making a startling, instinctive headed clearance of a Giggs shot which could have won it for United.

They might have questioned a moment of pointless petulance from Didier Drogba had robbed them of one of their penalty takers but who could query the nerve and courage of a bloke who put himself to fifth in the order because he knew it could well be the most pressurised kick?

Still, that wasn't the point; Terry was going to scold himself anyway. For ever and a day.

Frank Lampard, whose mum's recent death has put sport into a new perspective for him, tried to remind JT out there that "there are more important things than football" but knew that his mate was deaf to consolation. "Because it matters to him more than anyone else in the squad, it will be a frustrating time for him," said Lampard. "That's the way it should be because he's a winner."

The most maddening thing of all for Chelsea? Terry did not miss because of any failing of nerve. Rio Ferdinand reckoned he had looked at him stepping up and sighed to himself, "It's all over now". This wasn't a Chris Waddle or Gareth Southgate job. He failed because he slipped on the point of impact. Simple. Even then, it was just inches from being the perfect pen.

In a perverse way, though, maybe it was fitting that a scrappy, uneven game, which was illuminated by only a few flashes of quality worthy of the occasion and featured two sides who tended to cancel out each other's strengths because they knew each other too well, should have ended with such incredible tension.

For in terms of quality, if this was Mr Scudamore's 39th game gone global, then the rest of Europe may well have been muttering, "You can stick it," - until they ended up thinking of the elbows, the red card, the theatre and become intoxicated by the personalised drama.

And at the centre of it all was a man who deserved so, so much better. When we last saw Terry, he was naturally keeping his own counsel but as someone asked for his autograph, he obliged and even summoned half a smile. Just as you can't fight fate, you'll never completely floor a fighter.