Technology slows the game
05 July 2010
Just a brief observation this week, concerning the vexed topic of technology in sport and if it has a detrimental effect.
As I write (a bit early this week) we are about to launch into the quarter finals of the football (soccer if you are a heathen) World Cup, while not that many miles from my doorstep we are at the semi final stage of the tennis at Wimbledon.
Earlier this week in the football world cup, two teams were victims of a gross miscarriage of justice. England were denied a perfectly good ‘goal’ against Germany because the officials didn’t see it, while Argentina were given an offside (and therefore illegal) goal against Mexico.
Thankfully the victories for Germany and Argentina were ultimately well deserved and so the consequences of those mistakes were not as significant as they might have been. However it did take the gloss off the victories and gave the defeated parties something to blame in the short term, and there have been cases in the past where such injustices have resulted in matches being won or lost. There is a limit to how much you can blame match officials; angles change perspectives and everything happens so fast and the officials only get one chance to see everything – it has to be right first time.
Technology could prevent such problems from happening. In our industry we have inspection technology that can make an instant go/no go call with a tolerance of microns, surely something the size of a football, or footballer, can fall within our detection abilities. Even, in many cases, the television cameras can be used to make clear decisions. The argument against is that it stops the game to refer to the pictures.
There is also debate about ‘chip-in-ball’ technology to assess if a ball has crossed the line, which has the advantage of not having to stop a game to give a reading (i.e. if it crosses the line then it sends an alert to the referee), but it has no use in instances like the Argentina v Mexico game when the incident involved players’ positions further upfield.
To contrast with Wimbledon, the players can call on Hawkeye, which no one doubts the absolute integrity of, to assess if a ball is in or out. It is simple. Admittedly tennis has the advantage of being a stop/start game and so there is a natural time when Hawkeye can be used, but it is still very quick AND does not require further human intervention – Haweye says whether it is in or out, not someone looking at the pictures. Why should that need to be any different in a football environment?
Apart from the need for sporting justice, it is interesting that the tantrums of tennis players in days gone by aimed at incompetent, or even cheating, officials have all but dried up given that they now have nothing to base their arguments on. If the ball was out it was because they put the ball out and they have no one else to blame.
If technology could have a similar effect on the modern footballer then that too could only be a good thing – it might even return to being a sporting (in the proper sense of the word) game once more!
If an electronics company was developing such an application for football, now would be the ideal time to demonstrate it.
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