Back in attack
Think instead about a game a few days later, Ireland's final group match in Gelsenkirchen against a Dutch side blessed with talents of Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco van Basten.
Jack's army are just a draw away from a semi-final spot and the Dutch are huffing and puffing until a mis-hit Ronald Koeman shot finds Wim Kieft in an offside position. Kieft's header hits the deck in front of Packie Bonner and then takes off on a bizarre trajectory which takes the ball looping over the bamboozled Irish keeper and sends the Dutch into the last four.
The Irish go home and Van Basten goes on to score a sublime goal a thunderbolt of a volley from the tightest of angles in the final to help defeat the Soviet Union. It is ironic then, 14 years on, that had the recently formulated plans of the man who provided that championship's defining memory been in operation back then, Van Basten might not have had a winner's medal at all.
If the greatest and deadliest forward of generation, as he is described in 'Brilliant Orange,' David Winner's superb book about Dutch football, had seen his blueprint for the beautiful game implemented in 1988, Kieft's freak header past Bonner would not have been allowed and then who knows what might have happened. But then a man like Van Basten would probably be cool with that notion if it meant his ideas helped to correct what he now sees as "something fundamentally wrong with our game."
For the man who was twice named World Player of the year and won three European Footballer of the Year awards before injury forced him to curtail a truly glittering career at the age of 28, has put pen to paper and issued a 4,000-word thesis on how to make football "cleaner and more beautiful."
Published in a Dutch literary football journal called Hard Gras, Van Basten's manifesto explains, amongst other things, how cameras could be used to make the game not only fairer, but quicker, too and makes a reasoned and responsible case for using electronic aids to review referees' decisions.
The manifesto, entitled 'Football Must Become Fairer, Cleaner and More Spectacular!' is intended to provoke "a debate that needs to be conducted urgently" and is all the more remarkable because it comes from a man who seems to have no ulterior motive or of political careerism within the sport. It comes from a man whose goals not only won Holland the European Championship but also led AC Milan to two European Cup victories before needing his ankle to be permanently set in place to halt the excruciating pain his injuries from the game left him with.
Now 37, and after periods of depression which left him unable to even watch football, Van Basten has returned to the game and is back with his first footballing love, Ajax, assisting the under-19 teams as well as undertaking a coaching course that will allow him to manage at professional levels. One module of the course was to write an analysis of three World Cup matches.
Van Basten's damning conclusion was that: "Football has not moved with the times. Never before has the game suffered so much from its rules, several of which I think are deeply antiquated." The plea for cameras to be used to determine offsides and penalties is not a new one. Indeed, the issue is usually raised when a coach feels a refereeing decision has gone against his side. Van Basten takes the debate further, arguing that modern football has become so fast that some instant decisions simply cannot be accurate.
"A referee (and assistant referees) cannot judge with the naked eye whether it was offside or not," he writes. "Not only Italy in the World Cup (with, I believe, four wrongly disallowed goals and countless 'disallowed goals yet to be scored') were the victims."
Van Basten mentions other instances, such as the Holland-England World Cup qualifying match in 1993, when Ronald Koeman brought down David Platt in the penalty area, but was only shown a yellow card, while England were given a free kick instead of a penalty. Later in the game, Koeman, who should no longer have been on the pitch, scored from a free kick. Holland went to the World Cup the following year instead of England.
"There was nothing right about that. That was so unjust," Van Basten insists. Rather than blaming referees, Van Basten says match officials need more help.
"There are between 13 and 25 cameras at big matches. Use them! There should be three independent judges in the production room who replay crucial moments, stop the tape, make a decision and then inform the referee through an earpiece. They can overrule the referee at any time.
"The big advantage is that spectators and players can see on a screen that the decision was right, so that there will be no anger or frustration. I understand that an interruption of between 15 and, at most, 30 seconds is enough to see whether it was offside."
Van Basten anticipates the obvious objection that such measures would bring about constant delays play as judges study replays between two and 10 times per match for offside decisions alone, by Van Basten's own estimate.
FIRST, he writes: "How much time is sometimes taken up by throw-ins (10-20 seconds), a goal kick (30-60 seconds) or a free kick (30-90 seconds)?" But his crucial point is that if there is any doubt over an offside decision or a foul, the attack should continue and only be reviewed once it is over. "Only when the attack ends can any goal be cancelled. Now beautiful attacks are wrongly interrupted because the assistant referee (who is there to use his flag, which means he is more likely to do so) thinks it is offside."
By the end of the attack, the judges may be ready to signal instantly whether a goal was valid or not. Van Basten writes: "You sometimes hear that mistakes are part of the charm of football. Oh yes? Ask the Italians. Ask the Belgians (Wilmots' goal wrongly disallowed against Brazil) and ask the Americans (an unseen handball by a German in the penalty area). Unjust elimination has no charm at all it's just frustrating. The charm of football is spectacle! Too often the discussion after a match is about the referee, his mistakes, the cheating, when it should be about the beauty of the game."
As to making the game cleaner, Van Basten again advocates the camera. "As everything is captured by the cameras, players who have committed fouls not seen by the referee should be given retrospective red or yellow cards straight after the match. The advantage: if players know this can happen, next time they will think three times before they misbehave (and yellow and red cards can also be cancelled retrospectively). The result: the game will become cleaner and more beautiful, something the football authorities have been aiming for for years, but never achieved." Now the foundations for debate have been put in place, Van Basten has no intention of following them through. As far as he is concerned his job is done, he has stoked the fire and now it is time for others to fan the flames as he returns to honing his coaching skills.
"It's not for me to go around promoting these plans, or to make sure they are implemented," he writes. "Now I'm still a neutral. Nobody can say: he's pushing his own interests. I'd be sad if none of my proposals made it. But I wouldn't be surprised, because Uefa and Fifa are stuffy institutions. They don't really give the impression of trying to improve the spectacle of football."
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