Well, quite a few weeks for World Cup scandal. Not only does Costa Rica feel aggrieved regarding their World Cup failure (thanks to an “offside” goal) but Ireland go and get knocked out via the hand of a now chastised Frenchman. Then to top it all off we have the President of FIFA being referred to as “an embarrassment” over said incident. Fun. And. Games.
On the subject of Henry’s misdemeanours I think it is important to undermine the calls for the game to be replayed. Don’t get me wrong I felt as personally wronged as everyone watching Sky that night but replaying matches solely on the principal of a wrong decision (however heinous) is ludicrous. Entertaining such ideas would drag us into a Groundhog Day reality wherein we continuously replay every game until the officials call all decisions 100% correctly. Aside from the fact such controversy adds untold entertainment to the game, this reduction to endless repetition would come about because it is impossible to classify what events would constitute a replay. Now before you say “a wrong decision in the build up to a goal”, take a moment to think about the complexity of actions which prelude any event in the beautiful game. It is not a case of the final pass… its whether the last throw in / corner / goal kick / free kick / penalty / handball / etc. was the correct decision and on and on you can continue. The fact is that with any goal scored, it would be possible to rewind back n number of decisions until you find an erroneous one and then claim the goal should not have stood for that reason. It just isn’t feasible.
The idea of a video ref has the same issues; however these can be solved due to the close vicinity of the prospective “fifth official”. Rugby officials are lucky in that when a controversial try comes into question, play naturally stops and the players (rightly or wrongly) go off celebrating with perennial man-hugs and jeering. This gives the officials time to confer and come to a collective decision based on the video footage. Unfortunately unless such an incident occurs in the immediate overture to a football goal, the referee will not be afforded this discussion-time. Of course, the argument is that if a goal is the result of a wrong decision; then they do have this time. When this is not the case the video-ref can flag up the incident to the referee at the next break in play. Which seems sensible; to be honest.
FIFA’s proposition of extra officials at the edge of each penalty area appears to me to be shying away from the fact that technology is well… better. Extra referees standing at the side of the pitch not only have the potential to distract the eye but they also lack the ‘replay’ feature which can be so detrimental to the conventional official set-up. This is not to say that R2-D2 will be replacing Howard Webb anytime soon, but the array of high definition cameras at football games today could serve a purpose other than making all those tellies in Dixons look great.
It‘s quiet in here! Why not leave a response?