Goal-line technology (GLT) has inevitably made its way into the game, and from this weekend will be available to Premier League referees. It was always going to happen, but is it a good thing?
Many within the game have been crying out for it for years now, and ever since Sepp Blatter changed his mind about the idea after England got away with one in Euro 2012 it’s seemed like just a matter of time until it was introduced. Referees are delighted about it, as it means that one less responsibility rests on their shoulders, and the general consensus is that GLT is a good thing. Refs will be alerted to whether a ball has definitively crossed the line or not within a second of it happening. They won’t have to rely on the lino’s eyesight any more, something which has helped and hindered several teams through the history of the game.
The Premier League will be using the Hawk-Eye system that tennis fans will be familiar with, and in truth it’s been really successful for them. But for me this is because of the regularity of dodgy line calls in tennis. There are borderline calls made in pretty much every other service game and bad calls happening as regularly as that can have a massive impact on a players’ match, or even their whole tournament.
But just how useful and worthwhile is it actually going to be for football? Stats from the Premier League last season show that there were just 3 occasions where GLT could have been used to allow or disallow a wrongly made call. Just 3 out of 380 matches and 1063 goals scored. It makes you wonder whether all the money and research being pumped into it is worth it when it’ll be needed so infrequently. Obviously, if it’s the difference between winning or losing a match, which means you win the league or get relegated, or end up knocked out of the cup then you’ll say it was worthwhile.
On a personal, greedy level, my teams have probably benefited more often from not having hawk-eye in the past. Spurs would have beaten us if Pedro Mendes’ goal had been given. England wouldn’t have beaten Ukraine in Euro 2012 if the linesman had spotted that Terry had cleared the ball from behind the line. And even though I wasn’t born, who knows what would have happened in the ’66 World Cup Final if England’s third goal hadn’t been given? The only notable exception is Frank Lampard’s goal not being given against Germany when you could have seen it was in from a mile away. But would England have knocked Germany out if Lampard’s goal had been allowed? We’ll never know, and that’s kind of where the magic of football is for me.
Nearly every weekend throws up some kind of debate and talking point for fans to argue about, and if we got to the stage of having every decision made perfectly we’d lose that. “We would have beaten you if this”. “I can’t believe he got a second yellow for that”. Tiny details of matches get spoken about for years after they finish mattering any more. And that’s one of the reasons why we call it the beautiful game.
I just feel we need to be careful what we wish for. I hope that goal-lines is as far as technology gets into our sport. Football should be the same game whether it’s Brazil vs Argentina in the World Cup Final or Stourpaine vs Blandford at the Draper Memorial Field.