With, for once, no midweek Chelsea action to fill up his senses, columnist Giles Smith is still trying to make sense of last Wednesday's long night.

Run that whole Burnley thing past me again, would you? In the intervening week - and especially since the resumption of normal service at West Brom on Saturday - it seems to have taken on the slightly blurred status of something which you feel fairly confident you witnessed (indeed, for which you seem to have a copy of the programme) but which might just have been a dream - maybe a dream you had while suffering from a particularly high temperature.

The basic drift, though, as I understand it (and you'll correct me if I'm wrong), is this: that we all pitched up last Wednesday night at around 7.45pm, in the casual expectation of a hatful of goals, of a swift passage into the next round of English football's second oldest and perhaps most regal knock-out competition, and of anything up to 70 minutes of first team action for Scott Sinclair.

And then we ended up sitting around into the early hours while a team containing rather more top quality names than one cares to mention at this point had a roaringly horrible, Eighties-style off-night against a club one division and 18 financial light-years below them.

The upshot being that, at some point around 2.00am on Thursday morning (or so it felt), we lost on penalties, of all things - though that, of course, was the evening's one redeeming feature.

The great brilliance of the penalty shoot-out, as a device for deciding locked-up matches, is the way in which it provides fans of the defeated side with an ample cushion of consolation, enabling them to leave the ground shrugging and muttering words like 'lottery'. We simply wouldn't have had that if we had lost to Burnley properly, in open play.

Have you noticed how managers of opposing teams tend to shake hands with each other before the penalty shoot-out? That's because they appreciate that the meaningful part of the encounter is already over and that what follows is basically just a padded-out version of drawing straws.

And of course, everybody who follows football knows that nothing worth winning was ever won on penalties (see Liverpool's European Cup victory in 2005, and also the one in 1984 against Roma, and their FA Cup victory in 2006, not to mention their League Cup win against Birmingham in 2001. And see also Manchester United's victory in the European Cup final last year, following 'events in Moscow'.)

Anyway, far be it from me to try to find excuses, overall, or even consolations, for last week's unusual embarrassment, which is probably best described as just one of those crazy little outcomes that make football the ceaselessly surprising entertainment form/ complete pain in the backside (delete as applicable) that it is.

Nevertheless, it did seem a bit rich of the The Guardian (a newspaper) to claim that Chelsea couldn't even beat a Burnley side that was 'reduced to 10 men'. As I remember it - and, again, I should point out that I was at least half-asleep in my seat by this stage of the evening - Burnley went down to 10 men with approximately 0.008 seconds of extra time remaining, meaning that, in fact, they were only down to 10 men for the penalty shoot-out. Which, of course, is a bit of a setback, but hardly a crippling one, nor one likely to embarrass our lot any further than they had already embarrassed themselves.

Whereas, if anyone was disadvantaged by shortage of numbers, it was the home side, when Franco Di Santo limped off, as extra time got under way, and could not be replaced, all three substitutes having been used. (This tiresome development was all the more annoying for happening just a few moments after Di Santo had come within about 4cms of removing the need for extra time to be played in the first place. How tantalisingly close my supper seemed at that moment. I was 4cms away from getting fed.)

Not, as I say, that being unable to beat Burnley with 10 men in extra time constitutes any kind of excuse for a club such as ours. But it's always worth getting the details straight.

For what it's worth, I thought Burnley were really good last Wednesday - better than a number of Premier League teams that have come to the Bridge this season and catastrophically wilted in the heat. And their fans were great, too - though not the ones who threw stuff, obviously.

You can't go throwing things at players because one day a player is going to get tired of that, and pick up what was thrown at him and fling it back. And then that player is going to get a three-match ban. (Dizzying, the logic underpinning all this, isn't it?)

Whatever the merits of the ban issued yesterday, I've heard people suggest that the Drog deserved some kind of official ticking off in any case, for large-ing it in front of the travelling supporters of a team from a lower division. True, he had just scored. And true, he had probably been receiving all kinds of not necessarily helpful advice, throughout the evening, from the fans behind that goal.

But the phrase 'rise above' comes to mind. And there were plenty of us in the ground who would have been happy to see the Drog at that point in the match, had he come to our nearest touchline, and who would not have been inclined to pelt him with small change, or anything else for that matter.

In the circumstances (one of the great players of world football, finding the net against Burnley), this may not go down as a moment that was especially notable for dignity, coinage or no coinage.

Anyway, the upshot is, farewell to the Drog for three Premier League games, and farewell to the Carling for another season.

Let's not forget, though, that the last time we went out of the Carling on penalties at home (versus Charlton, third round, 2005), we went on to win the league. I don't know about you, but I'd probably settle for that.