A few weeks ago, in a piece for SBS’s The World Game following the A-League grand final, I broached the subject of introducing video technology to help adjudicate on refereeing decisions such as the one that saw Central Coast Mariners denied a last-gasp opportunity to draw the game and, in an unfortunate consequence, Mariners goalkeeper Danny Vukovic outed from the sport for 15 months.
For me it just seems right that if the means is available to make the game fairer, then the game, run by FIFA, should embrace it. The international bodies governing tennis, rugby league and cricket have seen no problem doing so. All power to them. In my opinion those sports have been enhanced by the introduction of video and other technology.
Yet this week, presented with a chance to do something groundbreaking for football, the biggest sport in the world, FIFA has again baulked at taking a proactive step forward for all fans of the world game.
In Gleneagles, Scotland, the International Football Association Board, a body comprised of the four British football associations with UEFA and FIFA, voted down a proposal to introduce goal-line technology in football: the camera-based Hawk-Eye, well known in tennis and cricket.
The company developing the technology, Hawk-Eye Innovations, is apoplectic, as is the Football Association and the Barclays Premier League. Years of work and millions of dollars have produced nothing.
The killjoy in this drama is UEFA president Michel Platini, who is an opponent of such technology and advocates instead the introduction of two extra linesmen, one behind each goalmouth. FIFA president Sepp Blatter, mindful of protecting his power base, has predictably backed the Frenchman, saying Hawk-eye is “too complicated and very costly” and does not “necessarily add anything positive to the game and could harm the authority of the referee”.
This, despite both men being initially in favour of introducing Hawk-Eye to football and IFAB commissioning the company to develop a workable system at its last general meeting in Manchester in March 2007.
By all accounts, Hawk-Eye Innovations did exactly what was asked of it. According to its own website, it was “stipulated that a goal-line system must be accurate to 5mm” and “that the desired information is communicated to the referee in a quick, discreet manner… Hawk-Eye will provide an answer is less than two seconds”. What followed was 12 months of rigorous testing, all demonstrated by the company first-hand to IFAB officials. Premier League bods wanted the technology in place by 2009.
But because Platini wasn’t convinced, Blatter has buckled and now the international game is back at square one: beholden to the authority of referees, that tribe of untouchable but infallible geniuses which includes Mark Shield, Graham Poll and Luis Medina Cantalejo.
How simply having two extra officials is put forward as a viable solution when outrageous gaffes can, have been and will continue to be made by supposedly the best referees and linesmen in the world is beyond my comprehension.
The whole point of a technology such as Hawk-Eye is to eliminate the factor of human error. Just adding more humans doesn’t eliminate that possibility. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that putting in a camera does?
I am all for the purity and simplicity of football. I love the fact that the game is one of the most accessible in the world, available to be played by anyone with a ball, room for a field and a couple of goalposts.
But having Hawk-Eye introduced in the Premier League or, eventually, the World Cup isn’t going to suddenly mean that this romantic image of will be destroyed, that it’ll be incumbent on every football competition everywhere to install it at great expense.
It just means the most popular football league in the world, the English Premier League, has missed out on a chance to be fairer and the World Cup, the pinnacle of the game, will go on being an incubator of controversy and enmity.
Crucial decisions like Geoff Hurst’s disputed goal from the 1966 World Cup final will go on being made and FIFA will continue sitting on its hands, doing nothing.
As Jon Carter wrote sagely for Soccernet.com during the week: “FIFA like to project an image of progression, while the reality is that … football’s decision makers have a flagrant disregard for any good that technology could do for the game. They see some form of machine-orientated Puma advert as the outcome of allowing the slightest hint of technology into a game steeped in tradition.”
This attitude is counterproductive and regressive, the sort of head-in-the-sand conservatism you would expect in polo or royal tennis, not the most exciting, popular, dynamic sport in the world.
It really does make you wonder whether “fair play” matters to them at all.
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