What will football's first video-replay penalty award mean for the game?

For referees, and for football as a whole, the world might not quite have tilted on its axis but the tectonic plates surely shifted a little as a result of the first penalty to be awarded on the basis of video replay technology.

The FIFA Club World Cup might not have anything remotely like the cachet of the Champions League in Europe or the Copa Libertadores in South America — let alone its gigantic international namesake — but this year’s semi-finals in Japan, played earlier this week, did put down a marker of potentially historic proportions.

Indeed, it tells you a lot about the status of a tournament which has always been more about optics than reality that the Club World Cup was chosen as the arena for the first preliminary trials of Video Replay Technology, its big moment coming after half an hour in the game between local side Kashima Antlers and Colombian champions Atletico Nacional.