Chelsea captain John Terry had more than a football at his feet as he stepped up to take the penalty that, successfully converted, would have seen his club crowned European champions for the first time in their history.
On his broad shoulders laid the hopes and dreams of tens of thousands of supporters, a multi-million global TV audience, his teammates, club officials and a certain hard-to-please Russian billionaire who pays his considerable wages.
You could argue there was no-one better. Terry is Mr. Chelsea. Born and bred Blue; product of the club’s youth system; first Chelsea player to captain England for decades; a leader and warrior who last night played carrying a 10 day-old fractured arm. Who better then, to take responsibility for converting such a precious spotkick?
It’s easy to say ‘not him’ with the hindsight of that fatal slip of his standing foot and consequent scuffed shot that tragically struck the outside of the goalpost to hand the advantage back to eventual victors Manchester United. But seriously: ‘not him’.
Terry can and should be wholeheartedly forgiven for his miss, but he shouldn’t have put himself in that position in the first place. He might be Chelsea’s leader but in terms of skills for the job, it’s hard to believe, as a player whose job it is to keep goals out not score them, there weren’t others better equipped for the task.
You could argue such occasions require guts and steel by the bucketload, but conversely it was this emotional sense of responsibility and ‘heart over head’ thinking that prompted Terry to elect himself over delegating to another more capable.
Realising your limitations and forcing yourself to trust others is a key skill and challenge for any leader; specifically those running their own business. The personal commitment and risk you’re currently undertaking in creating your business breeds a natural parental instinct, and like mothers reluctant to leave their babies for the first time, it’s understandably hard to let someone else take charge.
But you should and the earlier you embrace it the better. It’s far easier to grow a business with many pairs of talented hands than just one. ‘A problem shared…’ and all that.
Bob Geldof used music, not sport, to make the same analogy at his week’s NESTA conference.
“The rock n roll band is the classic entrepreneurial activity. I could write a few tunes but I was extremely limited musically. So I had to get in a piano player, guitar player and drummer.
"And the entrepreneurial type and managerial type are two different animals altogether. The manager enables the ideas of the entrepreneur and at a certain point the entrepreneur must step back with all due modesty and allow the manager to take it forward.”
It might be just little old you at the moment, but think about sharing the burden as soon as you can afford it…