Premier League chief Executive Richard Scudamore has indicated that goal-line technology could be introduced as early as next season, but will the league really be a better place without officiating errors?
Barely a weekend goes by when the fallout is not dominated by the referee or his wingmen being dragged over the coals by fans, players, managers or the media. It seems the only people who aren’t allowed to make human errors are the blokes with more instinctive individual decisions to make than any one player.
In his annual Premier League report which is distributed to Parliament this week, Scudamore said, “The whole point of the game is about scoring goals. Players and managers careers can be defined by them.”
“The technology is available, it is the fairness that is important and the Premier League would introduce it tomorrow if it could. Now FIFA is constructively engaged, we are hopeful the 2012/13 season is a realistic aim.”
The debate over using technology to aid referees is one which never goes away yet in just those few sentences, Scudamore paraphrased the whole contradictory argument that introducing goal-line technology would help to make the footballing world a better place.
As Scudamore ignorantly assesses - the whole game is about scoring goals. Of course it isn’t, but as he’d only been involved in football for two years prior to accepting the £800,000p.a CEO position with the Premier League in 1999, we’ll let him off.
Football is much more than that, much more than life and death if you quote the late, great Bill Shankly, but without wanting to confuse Scudamore any further we’ll stick to the broad principles of scoring goals.
Scudamore’s proposals are based around the age old desire to have cameras or micro-chips or something similar placed into the posts to check whether a ball went over the line or not. Fine. Fairly self-explanatory. But would that be the end of it? Seamless officiating which would end ‘player and managers career defining moments?’ If fairness is important in the Premier League would the end of dubious goal-line decisions ensure complete fairness throughout the league? Certainly not.
Without being armed with statistics, it is easily argued that the amount of goal-line decisions concluded incorrectly pale into insignificance compared to marginal offside calls, dodgy penalties, iffy red cards, soft free-kicks and wrongly awarded corners that invariably lead to dozens of goals and shape countless games through the campaign. And how would Scudamore ensure fairness for incidents like these? Well, he wouldn’t. You’d just have to continue to take these ‘unfair’ decisions on the chin. Fair enough.
Confusingly, there only seems to be a desire to introduce goal-line technology into football from many parties, Scudamore and the general consensus of fans included. Part of the reason for the ongoing reticence to implement widespread technology in assisting referees is because there is great confusion over what should and should not be allowed to be interfered with. But the problems of halfway-house interference like goal-line technology would invariably cause more problems than it would solve, and as such, is best left alone.
The analogies to sports like tennis and cricket are made with positivity to influence the arrival of technological assistance in football, but those sports and the way decisions are derived in those sports are completely different to football.
Tennis, for example. The ball is either in or it’s out. In theory this is similar to football, was it or wasn’t it over the line? But the peripheral decisions in football mean there is always the possibility that the final decision on something as black and white as whether the ball crossed the line can easily be turned grey.
In tennis, there can’t be a handball or a foul, an offside or obstruction. In practice, it’s a great benefit to definitively know whether the ball went in or not, but what happens when the computer says ‘yes’ to one thing but the restrictions placed on the reach of video technology could not intervene when something else becomes apparent.
For example, is it beyond the realms of possibility that when having a look whether the ball went over the line or not, an offside or a handball is spotted in the build up to the shot? The limitations of technology being restricted to goal-line decisions means additional incidents could not be reviewed. In theory, you could have a goal that wasn’t given, that upon reflection shouldn’t have been given anyway, but is given because the ball did cross the line. You can’t imagine many associated with the ill-done by team taking that with much grace.
You could feasibly extend the jurisdiction to include incidents leading up to the goal-bound effort in question, but that only opens questions about why incidents could only be reviewed during a close goal-line call, and soon things would become very messy.
Bowing to ‘only’ introducing goal-line cameras would be the thin end of the wedge, and without doubt would eventually lead to further interferences elsewhere. It only takes one major incident to spark and ignite the many cinders of smaller claims which gather each and every week and before long, we would be refereed by some Pontius Pilate overlord sat like a Bond-villain in front of a wall of screens. Not exactly jumpers for goalposts.
Many decisions are far from clear cut which is why the idea of policing our game through the introduction of cameras and technology is a futile idea. Far too many of the disputed decisions are just that, disputed. There are victims and perpetrators and never can anybody be fully appeased. We cannot wholly eradicate error from our officiating, and if even the most sophisticated schemes will still lead to dispute, controversy and more Jamie Redknapp, why change and devalue our sport in the first place?
Only recently UEFA President Michel Platini insisted that the continents governing body are not seeking to turn to technology in order to eradicate mistakes from officiating. He talked down the introduction of goal-line cameras and video refereeing referral systems, as they would lead to ‘playstation football’. Quite what he meant by referencing the name of a key and lucrative Champions League sponsor isn’t that clear, although we get the picture. The UEFA stance is that they are happy enough to have the game officiated by humans, which will invariably lead to human error - very apt coming from UEFA.
The other more thought provoking reason for opposing technology is an ethical one. For decades games have been won and lost because of refereeing mistakes, so what makes this generation any more deserving of justice? Of course, the cash rewards on offer are far greater than at any period of the game but who stands to be made even richer from these correct calls? It’s certainly not the working class man, his son and his son’s son who’ve followed the team for generations.
To think that today’s football is any more important than any previous days is arrogant and egotistical. We do not need complete and utter fairness in our system, it has never been that way yet that has never diminished, only fueled the appeal of football as a sport. If somebody wins a game through good fortune, so be it. The record books show the winners, but it does not tell the whole picture of the piece of the unfortunate finalists or hard done by underdogs undone by a dodgy goal somewhere buried in the annals of time. Behind every winner there are losers and those losses can be unfair. But isn’t life? Is that why we relate so well to fate and fortune in football?
Swings and roundabouts and rubs of the green. Doesn’t it just make our sport better? After all, it’s not a matter of life and death.
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