Sepp Blatter will go into the emergency meeting of his Fifa executive today with the clamour growing for video technology to be brought quickly into football.
The Fifa president has signalled changes after Thierry Henry’s controversial handball that helped to decide the World Cup qualifying play-off between France and Ireland last month. But the Fifa executive’s talks will be against a background of demands for football to follow rugby union, tennis and cricket in using video technology to ensure that crucial decisions, which often determine the outcome of key games, cannot again be held up to ridicule.
Gérard Houllier, the former Liverpool manager and now technical director of the French football federation, led the calls for change yesterday and said that he believed video technology would be used within four years.
“We all agree that we need to help referees,” he told delegates at Soccerex, the world’s biggest football conference, here. “The fourth official should use a television monitor so that, in some circumstances, the match referee can speak to him through a microphone and just check and see on controversial decisions.
“It is not right that we go to a game as though it was the Stone Age and we cannot see replays, when someone sitting at home on the sofa with a cigar and a beer can see everything.
“The people opposing change are the ones who believe that the same rules should apply in a World Cup final as to a game in a village. They think it keeps football popular — but because of the Thierry Henry incident, football is unpopular.”
David Dein, the former Arsenal vice-chairman and an influential voice in world football, warned Fifa that there was no excuse for not bringing in goalline cameras immediately.
“It has to be introduced,” he said. “It works in rugby, tennis and cricket. In the end, we are paying cash to watch mistakes. Every referee I have met has been an honest man. They want help so why not give it to them?”
Dein has been behind the push by Premier League clubs for the introduction of goalline cameras but the opposition has been implacable from Blatter and Michel Platini, the Uefa president. They will keep the use of video aids at arm’s length at today’s meeting and opt for Platini’s system of using two extra referees — one behind each goalline — which could be introduced in the 2010 World Cup, which kicks off here in June.
Platini and Blatter will get backing from Franz Beckenbauer, the Fifa vice-president, who worries that the introduction of technology will dilute “the emotion of the game”.
Ireland’s players and officials will remain unconvinced by Beckenbauer’s case, though, given that their emotions were in turmoil after Henry’s blatant handball led to the goal that pushed them out of the World Cup.
Dein believes that France’s illicit goal is one of many that decide crucial games because of the lack of video replays that could help referees to get their decisions right. He has spoken to Keith Hackett, the general manager of the Professional Game Match Officials Board, the organisation that represents referees in England, who is also calling for video aids.
“The time has come for referees to get some help,” Dein said. “At every big game now there are 26 cameras, so the referee will never stand a chance. The time has come for us to stop being frightened of technology and to use it. The game has moved on and we have to move with it.”
Brian Barwick, the former head of ITV Sport and chief executive of the FA, criticised the football authorities’ conservative approach to technology now widely used in sport — except the one watched by hundreds of millions of people on TV every week. “I have always thought that technology was an absolute certainty,” he said. “The excuses put up against it do not stand up to scrutiny.
“By not using technology in football, the referee is the fall guy.”
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