In the link above, Nostrich (aka Richard, curator of the marvellous Give Me Something To Read) writes about the use of technology in football. I’d encourage you to read his well-considered and well-written post. In summary, he argues that football simply isn’t fair: there is too much luck involved, no technology in place to conclusively prove that decisions are made correctly, and therefore is not a game of pure skill.
One of my favourite things about football is that it is fundamentally the same game, whether contested by pub teams on a wet Sunday morning or by the largest nations in the world at an international tournament. Adding video replays or goal line technology for only those leagues and tournaments that have the required money and facilities to allow it removes this consistency and means that not all games will be subject to the same conditions. I would never see this as a positive step.
Such breaks in play will be too disruptive for the game. Richard notes that other sports that use video technology have natural breaks in play - between points in tennis, balls in cricket, plays in American football, etcetera. Football doesn’t have these natural breaks for reflection and consultation. This is a difficult obstacle for proponents of technology in football to counter, and I’m yet to hear a convincing argument.
I happen to agree with Sepp Blatter (a phrase I thought I’d never utter) about interrupting the flow of the game. England ‘scored’ twice in as many minutes against Germany. For a period of a few minutes either side, the game was end-to-end, high-energy, instinctual. Basic and primal, not entirely keeping with how I think England should play the game, yes: but it was entertaining. Consult a video in the middle of it, and all the flow and urgency is gone. If FIFA decide to allow technology to determine, say, whether the ball crosses the goal line, that sets a precedent. How could you stop there? Why not review every decision? Every offside, every corner, every minor indiscretion? We’d need a whole new set of laws to govern the number of appeals each team has, adding a further level of complexity to game that is beautiful in its simplicity.
There is also the sheer enjoyment of those seconds after a goal has been scored. Earlier today, on a Watford FC mailing list that I subscribe to, someone posted this in a thread on a similar discussion, which I fully endorse:
Really, I do marvel at how easy it is to dismiss the seconds that - for me, in my serious minority - make football what it is. Those seconds are precious, forever memorable and, more than anything, unexpected; you don’t get to have them back after the video review has been completed. When Allan Smart’s goal hit the back of the net at Wembley, the next ten or fifteen seconds were among the most precious of my entire life; I know I’m not alone on that, if nothing else. Hit pause while an unseen official checks that he wasn’t offside and, even if that only takes five seconds, you’ve created a quite different dynamic; a wholly inferior dynamic, to my mind.
That’s an extreme example, obviously. But it’s proving quite hard to establish a fairly basic premise: that “the right result” isn’t a goal to be pursued at any cost.
Adding an official to review video evidence doesn’t narrow the margin of error - it simply adds another one. How many of these decisions are clear cut, even on the third or fourth replay from yet another alternative angle? The video evidence still has to be examined and interpreted by a human.
Football is supposed to be fun to watch. Having a debatable decision go for or against you adds so much to the appeal of the game, and introduces an element of random uncertainty that is as fun as it is frustrating. Just the same as an injury to your team’s star striker as a result of an innocuous collision is frustrating, or a rain-sodden pitch stopping a goal-bound shot from creeping over the line.
Admittedly, as Richard notes, a game with so few goals means that a poor decision can have a large effect on the game. But this is simply the game we all grew up with. A percentage of decisions have always been made incorrectly; it is just the increased media coverage that serves to highlight and magnify them. Whether we turn on the TV, attend a match or put our shin pads on and actually play, we all know that the referee has the final say, and is fallible. We all know this, and we should embrace it.
Crikey. I’ve written more words about football this past week than in the rest of my life.
