Once the immediate disappointment has subsided in the Tottenham Hotspur camp, the legacy of elimination from the Uefa Cup by PSV Eindhoven may prove to be a steely determination to do better next season.

Ledley King, the captain, had been substituted before the game entered extra time and could only watch as Jermaine Jenas and Pascal Chimbonda failed from the penalty spot on Wednesday, but King knows that Tottenham should not have allowed the match to go to a shoot-out. An error decided the first leg in favour of the Dutch champions and chances were missed in Eindhoven either side of Dimitar Berbatov’s goal.

“This was another cup Spurs could have won this season and it’s a horrid way to go out, but we let our chance slip,” King said. “We feel we had the players to win the competition, we had confidence in the team that we could get the result. The first leg has cost us. We know we have goals in our team and we believed we could come here and get more than one. We’re just bitterly disappointed we didn’t push on after the first goal.”

However, he was encouraged by the performance against a team who had qualified for the Champions League and lead the Dutch league. “We set out to win the game and tactically we got it just right,” King said. “We were the better team and we looked the most likely to score again, but when it went to penalties it was a lottery.”

Thanks to victory in the Carling Cup, Spurs have another chance next season. “For us to win something means that the season will still go down as a positive year for us,” King said. “Now we have that taste of winning something, we believe we can go on to do more. We still realise that we have a lot of work to do, but we have learnt from this and we will come back next year a stronger and better team.”