Football embraces technology at last but needs to go even further
Referees need video help to make the right calls on fouls.
Football is being dragged inch by inch into the 21st century. For decades, football, led by dinosaurs like Sepp Blatter, has resisted the use of technology. Other sports used it, the world used it, but not football.
No no, football didn’t need technology. It’s such a great game, its esteemed leaders feel, it can exist in a timewarp, immune to the advances made in every other aspect of life.
Blatter kept telling us that not only are refereeing mistakes part of the game, they are – and he really believed this – GOOD. They give us something to talk about. If TV replays were used to clear up every close call, what on earth would the fans talk about? Blatter perhaps forgot that there’s been a fair amount of discussion about, for instance, World War Two, but that is generally regarded as not so good.
But then Blatter contradicted himself. I was at the GermanyEngland game at the 2010 World Cup, down in the cheap seats below Emperor Blatter and his fat cat buddies spilling over the sides of the best seats in the house.
Fans found it hard to know what to look at. The game, Blatter, or the German players’ wives and girlfriends who were sitting in a section up to our left. But when Frank Lampard launched a shot that hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced down way beyond the goal line, and out again, and the officials said No Goal, all eyes turned to the odious Swiss as he did his best to look Not Guilty.
His negligence had cost England that goal, a goal which would have made it 2-2. Who knows how the match, which ended 4-1 to Germany, would have panned out had the goal stood? Afterwards, Blatter (who, remember, had been in favour of referring blunders) changed his tune. He said: ‘‘Perhaps now iss ze time to reconsider technology in ze instance of if it’s a goal, if it’s not a goal.’’
That’s how we ended up with computer chips in the ball and gamma rays on the goal line.
Now with that particular dinosaur sinking into the quicksand of his own making, the tectonic plates are sliding a little more. Various leagues and competitions, including the A League, are trying out new innovations to improve the game and help the refs, whose job has in recent years been made impossible by the increased speed of the game and the increased determination of the players to deceive him. How absurd that all these years, with cameras on hand which would let the referee make the correct decision within moments, the referee has been denied use of them?
I was also at the Brazil-Ghana game at the 2006 World Cup, when Brazil scored a goal from an offside position. Replays of controversial incidents were not shown on the stadium screens normally, but somehow this one slipped through the system, and the Ghana players could see that the scorer, Adriano, was offside. They pleaded with the referee to look at the proof. He refused. The referee’s decision is final. Even when he’s wrong. Even when he knows it.
Two weeks ago a Leicester player fouled an Atletico player outside the box in a Champions League match. As refs have done since time began, this one incorrectly gave a penalty. Atletico scored. A moment of incompetence potentially costing Leicester millions of pounds.
Wrongs like this need to be righted, and anything that allows referees do so is good.
The argument that football is a flowing game, that TV replays will slow it down, is invalid. Modern football seldom flows, it’s a game of stoppages because the players are constantly trying to get the game stopped, with their fouling and diving. The stoppages are frequently extended by over a minute as the players bicker with the ref every time an important call is made. But players have stopped arguing about goal line decisions because they know the technology has made the right call, and that’s sped the game up.
Video assistance with fouls will have the same effect.