Another night of shoot-out misery was compounded for Chelsea last night when Didier Drogba, their Ivory Coast striker, was forced to apologise for throwing what appeared to be a coin back into the crowd during their Carling Cup defeat by Burnley at Stamford Bridge. His contrition is unlikely to save him from disciplinary action by the Football Association.

Drogba, having just given Chelsea the lead, was seen to gesture to the Burnley fans behind the goal in the Shed End — an action for which he was booked — but then appeared to return an object that had been thrown on to the pitch. In 2002, Jamie Carragher, the Liverpool defender, was sent off in an FA Cup tie against Arsenal at Highbury after throwing a coin back into the crowd. He received a mandatory three-match ban.

Drogba said on the official Chelsea website: “This is something I want to make clear. I tried to celebrate the goal and I received some things at me. The big mistake I did was to throw it back so if someone was hurt I just want to apologise for it.

“This is not something I should show in a football match and I want to apologise. It was an incident in the heat of the moment and I regret it. It was just a mistake and nothing more.”

A club spokesman said: “We will deal with this in the usual way. We are aware there is an incident. But we will not discuss it further until we have seen the referee’s report.”

Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Chelsea manager, said: “I have not spoken with Didier about any problem. The referee gave him a yellow card but I did not see what happened.”

It was a dismal end to a calamitous night for the Barclays Premier League leaders. No team that loses a shoot-out is ever going to support it as a method of deciding a drawn cup-tie, but Chelsea have more reason than most to curse the spot-kick lottery as they lost on penalties for the fifth successive time.

Not since a League Cup tie against Ipswich Town in 1998 have Chelsea prevailed in a shoot-out. If there was a bright spot for them last night, it was that John Terry did not have an opportunity to relive his agony of last season, when he missed the penalty that would have won the shoot-out in the Champions League final against Manchester United in Moscow. He was an unused substitute and could only look on as Brian Jensen, the Burnley goalkeeper, saved from Wayne Bridge and John Obi Mikel.

Scolari fielded a team that was below full strength, without Nicolas Anelka and with Terry and Frank Lampard on the bench, but that still contained formidable attacking players.

“I had minimum nine players out and I kept some players back because they have played many games,” Scolari said. “I knew that Burnley play well, but we put out a team that we believed would win the game and we had the chances to do it. If we had more quality in this area we would have won the game.”

Scolari would not concede that the result was an embarrassment. “We lost a competition,” he said. “It’s not normal for us. We want to win all competitions and we need to understand what happened.”

On a night of cup drama in London, Tottenham Hotspur continued their remarkable revival under Harry Redknapp when Fraizer Campbell and Roman Pavlyuchenko each scored twice in a 4-2 victory over Liverpool at White Hart Lane.