World Cup 2014: You Cannot Be Serious!

We are now near the end of the first batch of World Cup games so what do I think so far? Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s a definite improvement on the 2010 tournament when we were desperately waiting for the games to burst into life. From a pure entertainment point of view it has been good from the start and, with the exception of the dull Iran vs Nigeria fixture, all the games have produced plenty of attacking play and a decent number of goals.

On the downside, the refereeing has often been poor – particularly in the opening fixture in which Croatia were well and truly mugged by the home-blowing ref. We have seen, however, the first positive use of goal-line technology when France were rightly awarded a goal that was really too hard to detect for any official – let alone the awkward position of the official on the day. I think this proves the worth of such technology but couldn’t it be used for other contentious decisions?

The use of technology is now common in many sports. Cricket and Rugby have both benefitted from it. Whilst these are both notoriously difficult to judge they are also very much gentlemen’s sports in which a certain respect for one’s opponents is a given. This is also largely true of tennis but the game under the watchful gaze of Hawkeye is the picture of sporting respect and a world away from the apoplectic rage that John McEnroe used to display at single duff line calls.

Would such technology improve football? I certainly think it would. Whilst penalty and offside decisions would benefit from this it would strongly discourage those who try it on as they would inevitably be found out and punished accordingly. The argument is always that querying decisions would hold the game up but it is rare for a penalty to be resolved in under a minute and with three substitutes per game would three referrals to the electronic umpire really make that much difference? Actually, I think it would : by producing a better spectacle.