One small step for footballkind
The single greatest rule change for the grand old game since man first walked on the moon! Sorry, I mean since a man first felt over the moon.
Not wishing to pop anyoneâs bubble, you understand, but I have two words in response to all the hype and hoopla surrounding footballâs belated embrace of goal-line technology: âThierryâ and âHenryâ.
Yep, sorry to heap painful old memory on top of painful recent memory for Irish football fans, but Hawk-Eye and GoalRef and â to judge by the overall performance of the umpires at Euro 2012 â all the kingâs horses and all the kingâs men, couldnât have put Irelandâs World Cup 2010 bid back together again on that dark November night in Paris. Because, for that to have happened, the decision-makers on the pitch in the Stade de France would have had to have access to the kind of advanced technology which, sadly, was available only to a select few millions upon millions of people looking in from around the world.
Which is another way of saying , yes, Iâm delighted to see goal-line technology coming on stream but, no, Iâm sorry, it just doesnât go far enough. Barely over the line, in fact.
The truth of it is that ball-over-or-not-over-the-line incidents are relatively rare in football, something confirmed by the fact that Sepp Blatter could make so much about the epiphany he experienced when he saw Frank Lampard denied a perfectly good goal at the World Cup in South Africa. The FIFA boss also made reference to Marko Devicâs disallowed goal for Ukraine against England at the Euros last month, pointing out that âUkraine can still not believe it nowâ. Not half as much as the rest of us canât believe that it has taken this long for the worldâs greatest and most popular game to start catching up with other sports, Sepp old chum. Still, weâre talking about just two incidents in two recent tournaments which could have been resolved by goal-line technology and, in terms of top-level football worldwide, maybe a dozen in total since Geoff Hurst set the ball rolling, or not, against West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final.
By contrast, in the intervening 46 years, there have been innumerable incidents of goals being wrongly given or wrongly ruled out, often at huge cost to one of the teams involved, through basic human error of a kind which, ever since the introduction of the slow-mo replay, the technology has been available to rectify in almost the blink of an eye.
When I were a lad, there was a regular comic strip in âGoalâ magazine which posed questions designed to test the readerâs knowledge of the rules of football. âYou Are The Refâ, it was called. Thanks to multi-camera angles and video replays, we are all refs nowadays and, absurdly, often better placed in our armchairs or on our barstools than are the officials on the pitch to see whether or not sporting justice has been done.
Speaking of which, I have yet to hear a persuasive counter-argument to the solid truth that, as things stand, the refusal to employ video-technology for a whole range of contentious incidents not only fails to punish foul play but, much, much worse, actively penalises the good stuff.
One ubiquitous example will suffice: the talent and timing which goes into springing an offside trap with hair-trigger precision but which, even if the move ends up with the ball in the net, counts for nothing because the official on the line, suffering the limitations of the human eye, has wrongly raised his or her flag. And, as ever, television viewers are able to see within seconds the truth of what has just transpired. How can that routine scenario possibly uphold the much-vaunted spirit of the game? I appreciate that it would be a revolutionary move to utilise video replay to adjudicate on major issues like offside, handball, diving and other examples of foul play, especially where all of those relate to the validity of goals allowed or disallowed. And, certainly, its introduction would need to be carefully planned and road-tested. But I think the fear that the game would become too disjointed is overstated.
Recall Paris again and the time it took Shay Given, even though moving at a fair old clip, to make his anguish known to referee Martin Hansson. Definitely longer than the time it would have taken an Eagle-Eye up in the stadium TV production room to run the replay and communicate the message âClear handball in the build-up. No goalâ to the refereeâs ear-piece. Imagine. A chastened Henry would have had to take his yellow card medicine and, inspired by the righteousness of their cause, Ireland would have gone on to turn their dominance on the pitch into an aggregate win on the scoreboard. And then, with the country in a state of high excitement and celebration, the Boys in Green would have gone off to South Africa and, er, promptly lost all three games at the World Cup finals.
Ah well, Iâve never claimed video technology is a panacea. Just a cure for a lot of ills. For now, football has taken a small step in the right direction. But the giant leap is still a long way off.
