The incident in question took place in a recent game between Sochaux and Nice in France’s Ligue 1.The Russian Linesman would have said goal.The video evidence suggests otherwise.Blatter’s team of additional referees hanging around behind the goalposts might still have got this one wrong.When will they do the sensible thing and allow technology to catch up?
4 comments on “We know what the Russian Linesman would have said”
interesting video, i thought it is a goal till i saw the second replay.
i totally agree, ignoring the video technology makes the game unfair sometimes.
adding more referee might result in conflicting opinions in such an occassion, it will only confuse the referee more
How do you practically implement video coverage to assess referee decisions? At what point in time do you use the video? Take the Thierry Henry example again. Proponents of video assistance simply say, you see using the video would have clearly shown the hand and the referee would have canceled the goal. Right, but now imagine that the same video would have shown a split second earlier an Irish player committing a foul on a French player in the penalty area. According to FIFA rules, the referee’s decision is based on the first foul when there is a succession of them. This scenario would have led to a penalty for the French team! What I am trying to get to here is that you can’t use video because football can’t be chopped into sequences. Take another famous example, Geoff Hurst’s blasting shot on the goal post during the England- Germany 1966 World Cup final in Wembley. The goal was awarded, but here again, what if the video would have spotted an English player committing a foul just before; do you go back the original foul or do you only concentrate on if the ball entirely crossed the goal line? Using video just doesn’t make sense to me because due to the sequence of actions in a game, the decision to use video coverage at a certain point in this sequence is in itself completely subjective.
Maracanazo – there has been plenty of precedence with NFL. Of course they are not going to review every foul, but when an entire team instantly yells handball during a goal – that’s certainly the time for the ref to get a call down from the “video referee” or watch the reply himself. This has been effective in the NFL.
Patrick
Agree. Although I also see Maracanazo’s point of it being hard to extract footage of discrete events from a sport with such continuous motion such as soccer. However, the referee should focus on the event that is clearly disputed. Not something else that he picks up on replay. I think the “offsetting penalties” rule should not apply in soccer.