You are the ref until Blatter sees the light

IT WAS interesting to learn this week that the Army v Navy American football game played on December 7, 1963 was the occasion for the first use of action replay in televised sport.

The big moment came with an Army touchdown late in the game, the cue for the adventurous director to roll it there again. Concerned that innocent viewers might misinterpret what they were seeing, the commentator for the match reportedly screamed: “This is not live, ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again.”

And so a staple of all televised sport was born although, almost a half-century later, the world’s most popular game still hasn’t come to terms with the technology’s most obvious and useful application, leaving football to lag behind rugby union, rugby league, tennis and most of the major American sports, including, believe it or not, rodeo.

Yep, it seems even the fringed blazers of the buckin’ bronco have sanctioned the use of video technology for – and I quote – “evaluating timing issues, fouls against the rider for touching the bull or ground with his free hand or using the fence to stay on the bull, or fouls by the bull, such as dragging the rider across the fence.”

A couple of thoughts arise. How subtle is a foul by a bull that it would require a camera to spot, say, that the beast was dragging a man across a fence? And as for the rider “touching the bull with his free hand” – well, there but for a typographical error goes Thierry Henry.

Still, the point is that even the real cowboys are way ahead of their counterparts in FIFA and UEFA.

In the aftermath of that black night in Paris, the demand was all for the wrong kind of replay. In truth, Ireland were never going to get a second bite at the cherry, never mind a 33rd spot in South Africa next summer but, even as they went a bit overboard in their efforts to seek redress, at least credit the FAI for petitioning FIFA to examine using video technology as a matter of urgency.

And, just for one brief moment there, it seemed as if the momentum across the game in general was building up to some kind of critical mass. Except that, once again, Sepp Blatter was not for turning, with the result that video technology was long-fingered for further investigation and even the modest, half-way house proposal of umpires behind the goals was deemed altogether too complicated to organise in time for a World Cup tournament which is still almost six months away.

If nothing else, at least those of us who have long championed video no longer feel so very alone. So angered were football folk in these islands by the blatant injustice suffered by Ireland in Paris that many who had previously dismissed the application of the technology could now be heard declaiming variations on the theme of enough is enough.

How wonderfully well minds are concentrated when chickens – or even cockerels – start coming home to roost.

Yet, opposition remains, and not just at the game’s highest levels where, unfortunately, it really counts. But I would contend that none of the all too familiar arguments against has ever really stood up to any kind scrutiny.

Perhaps the most risible – and not just because it’s oft-uttered by Sepp Blatter – is that a video ref would somehow rob the game of its essential humanity. Well, hey, if that’s a principle worth maintaining then let’s take the ref’s whistle away and make him blow through his fingers. Or remove his watch and make him tell the time by the position of the sun. (Although if the game fully embraced that concept, I guess there’s always the danger that, like those people at Knock, Alex Ferguson might temporarily go blind). And while we’re at it, let’s chop down the cross bar and dismantle the goal nets as well. In other words, let’s row back on every technological innovation which football has ever embraced in the course of its evolution. Video is just the latest available, that’s all. It’s really nothing to be scared of. It won’t steal football’s soul, promise.

Then there’s the argument that going to the video ref would cause too many interruptions in the game. Listen, in Paris, by the time the Irish players had stopped protesting and the French players had stopped celebrating, millions of people far from the Stade de France were already intimately familiar, in real time and in slow-motion, with the Hand of Gaul. A video ref in the stands could have alerted Martin Hansson in less than the time it took Shay Given, even approaching light speed as he was, to reach the Swedish referee.

The stop-start argument simply fails to acknowledge that, where the really controversial decisions are concerned, the game could hardly be any more stop-start than it already is.

To the complaint that video technology would create one law for the rich and one for the poor, the watertight case for the defence is personified in two friends of mine, one of whom plays tennis, the other rugby. Neither, I can vouchsafe, has had their enjoyment of their sports in any way diluted by the absence from their club pitch and tennis court of the TMO and Hawkeye.

Which brings us, finally, to the heart of the matter: the ridiculous anomaly whereby Joe Bloggs, slumped in his front room with a beer, perhaps thousands of miles from the game, is often better positioned to correctly call a big decision than the match official stationed just yards from the action.

‘You are the ref’ used to be a popular magazine feature when I were a lad. The way Sepp and the boys continue to run things, we might as well be.