HMMM 5 seconds is a problem is it...but its ok to have players swarming around the refs for minutes after an incorrect call by the refs because that is romance to Blatter . Time to go Fatso !!

Hiddink calls for Blatter's head

Former Socceroos coach Guus Hiddink challenged FIFA President Sepp Blatter to introduce video technology for football or immediately resign, as the fallout spread from two refereeing blunders at the World Cup.

But FIFA stood firm in its refusal to be drawn on the controversial issue, and didn't send officials with responsibility for referees to its daily briefing in South Africa, despite the furore over blatantly wrong decisions that contributed to the elimination of England and Mexico.

"Sepp Blatter should announce tomorrow that video replay will be implemented or he needs to resign," Hiddink, one of the world's most respected coaches, said on Monday.

The organisation which represents players around the world also demanded that referees be given the most modern tools to do their job.

"We can do it, the football world wants it and yet it is still being thwarted. That is unacceptable," said FIFPro spokesman Tijs Tummers.

Blatter has offered no public comment - not even on his much publicised Twitter feed - since attending both teams' games, where he witnessed the errors of judgment by two referees and their assistants.

Television replays immediately showed that England was denied a legitimate goal against Germany when Frank Lampard's shot bounced down from the crossbar and over the goal line.

Uruguayan referee Jorge Larrionda waved away the 38th-minute effort, which would have levelled the game at 2-2. Germany went on to win 4-1.

Four hours later, Argentina's first goal in a 3-1 win against Mexico was scored by Carlos Tevez from an offside position but was allowed by Italian referee Roberto Rosetti. Mexico players protested to the match officials after seeing replays accidentally replayed on a giant screen inside the stadium seconds later.

Blatter has repeatedly rejected video technology, arguing it would slow the game down and remove the romance and tradition of the game.

As a result, match officials are denied access to images seen within seconds by hundreds of millions of television viewers, and most stadium spectators via replays broadcast on giant screens.

Technically, the referee in the Mexico-Argentina match would not have been allowed to base his decision on even a glimpse of the footage on the giant screen.

"Let it be as it is and let's leave football with errors," Blatter said in 2008 when experiments with goal-line technology and video replay were halted by FIFA's rules panel, the International Football Association Board.

However, FIFA found a defender in Brazil coach Dunga, on the grounds that all publicity is good for the game.

"I would leave it the way it is," Dunga told reporters. "If there is no controversy in football, you wouldn't be here and I wouldn't be here."

The debate is undoubtedly unwelcome to FIFA which hoped it had dealt with the technology issue in March, when IFAB declined to restart technology experiments.

FIFA had no desire to revive the discussion Monday, midway through its showpiece event.

Under hostile questioning at a briefing which attracted double the usual number of reporters, spokesman Nicolas Maingot said he was not in a position to discuss decisions by referees or the rules panel.

"We obviously will not open any debate," Maingot said. "This is obviously not the place for this."

FIFPro's Tummers said Rosetti had no choice but to wrongly allow the Argentina goal because he could not be seen to rely on video replays.

"You could see the doubt in his eyes. Technology does not undermine the authority of referees, it only helps them," Tummers said.

That view was shared by the inventor of Hawkeye, a system used in tennis to judge line calls but spurned by FIFA in 2008.

"Referees want goal-line technology. It would be there to help them, not to replace them," Paul Hawkins told the British agency PA on Monday.

Hawkins believes his system, which uses a number of cameras positioned around the stadium to calculate the ball's position, could have transmitted a message to Larrionda, the Germany-England referee, within a half-second.

FIFA’s tech resistance is letting down football
3Comments
29 Jun 2010 | 00:00

I don’t care what anyone says. England’s disallowed goal in the Round of 16 clash against Germany was one screw-up too far. That it lost 4-1 in the final analysis is irrelevant.

What is relevant is that FIFA had the opportunity three months before the World Cup to tell the world it would not stand by and countenance such a miscarriage of justice by throwing its support behind goal-line technology and it refused to take it.

Decisions as blatantly wrong as the one that denied Frank Lampard and England a chance to tie the game at 2-2 have no place in a suburban park, let alone a sudden-death World Cup second round match between two of Europe’s mightiest teams.


If this outrage doesn’t change FIFA’s thinking then the game has no hope.

This World Cup is already a joke due to awful refereeing decisions, inconsistent application of the rules and the dreaded Jabulani ball. Brazil 2014 must not be allowed to suffer the same fate.

You might recall I wrote about the video technology issue back in March, when the International Football Association Board, the body that approves changes to Laws of the Game, categorically ruled out the idea of adopting such technology at its annual general meeting.

FIFA used its four votes to join with Wales and Northern Ireland to defeat the motion by England and Scotland. (Why Britain has such clout in IFAB is another issue altogether, which I am not going to tackle here, but that too must change.)

FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke explained the decision to discontinue consideration of the Cairos micro-chipped ball and Hawk-Eye goal-line technology by taking a staunchly Luddite view of the game.

“Technology should not enter into the game,” he said. “Why should we have technology in a game where the main and unique parts should be the humans, players and referees?

“If we start with goal-line technology then any part of the game and pitch will be a potential space where you could put in place technology to see if the ball was in or out, whether it was a penalty and then you end up with video replays. The door is closed.”

I criticised this disingenuous Pandora’s box argument, citing the example of cricket, tennis and rugby league, which had opened their sports to technology and not had their integrity compromised, flow suspended or essence diminished.

“All three sports have not ground to a halt after opening the door to innovation.”

My TWG colleague Les Murray took an alternate view and issue with my “shooting down” of Valcke.

“True, Jesse,” he wrote. “But those sports are not football. They are games of stops and starts, of staccato lurches rather than continuity… this is not true of football.

“Football is not about justice and never has been. It’s about drama, and drama, on occasion, can have a tragic ending… like prime ministers and presidents, football governors were not put in their places just to administer.

"At times they are also required to provide leadership and this is what the IFAB and FIFA are doing. So let’s stop the whining and give them some slack.”

We agreed to disagree and the argument fizzled out. But now it is back with a vengeance and something has to be done about it, once and for all.

I haven’t spoken to Les since the England-Germany game but I’m sure – hope – he would agree the sport we love, and the World Cup, is being ruined by human error.

Paul Hawkins, the inventor of Hawk-Eye, is adamant the suggestion that goal-line technology will slow down the game, peddled by FIFA president Sepp Blatter, is a fiction.

Hawkins contends that with the Hawk-Eye system, if a ball goes over the line, a beep is transmitted to the earpiece of the match referee within half a second.

But Blatter claimed in a conversation with leading footballers on the FIFPro website the beep is transmitted in five.

In response to a question from John Terry, irony of ironies, on what FIFA’s position is on “the use of technology to help referees and their assistants, he said the world body would accept it “but it has to be a solution that is precise, fair and immediate”.

Blatter rubbished Hawk-Eye’s testing process at Reading FC (when the club was in the Premier League), which returned 100 per cent accurate results.

“It took no fewer than five seconds to get the results [from the goal line to the referee],” Blatter told Terry.

“Five seconds – that’s enough for the ball to be cleared and another goal chance to arise at the other end of the pitch. Imagine stopping the game at that moment? We need to find something better – that’s obvious – and while we wait for that we’ll be carrying out tests by adding two referees [in place for Euro 2012].”

Hawkins was so indignant about it he wrote an open letter to Blatter in September last year, which you can read in full, including Blatter’s full response to Terry’s question.

“He repeated his misinformation again at the FIFA Congress before the World Cup,” alleged Hawkins in an interview with the Scottish Herald. “Yet he knows, and everybody else knows, that our technology is 100 per cent accurate.”

If this is right, and the truth of the matter was known to Blatter, Valcke and others at FIFA, then that really is a scandal – and one far bigger than the outrageous disallowed goal that denied England a legitimate goal in their most important match in four years.

“Fans love to debate any given incident in a game. It is part of the human nature of our sport,” chirruped Blatter in March when IFAB dumped on Cairos and Hawk-Eye.

True, Mr Blatter, but fans love seeing the correct decisions being made a whole lot more. For the good of the game, embrace technology and stop dithering.