At some stage this weekend, a referee will make an appalling mistake. And, when he does, a sage in the stand, or the pub, or the club, will turn to a captive audience and announce that this is why football should now be ruled by video replay. There will be no mistakes, apparently, the world will be a fair place and all will be happy. At which point, you may wish to look him straight in the eye, and ask the question that should grow to be the standard retort to all new technology know-it-alls.
“Excuse me, mate, but didn’t you see the first Test in Jamaica?”
I did and it was a farce. A valuable farce, though, because it demonstrated, once and for all that, in most cases, television replays add to confusion rather than resolving it.
Nobody who was present in Kingston would advocate widening video use and many would chuck the practice out of cricket, let alone offering it to football.
The Kingston test marked the debut of what is known as the referral system, similar to that used in tennis: two appeals to the third umpire from each side in each innings. Appeals are struck off one by one if wrong, but stay if judged right. Typically, England’s were frittered away very early, but that is not the cause for complaint.
Put simply, most referrals proved a waste of time.
The view of the third eye was often no more conclusive than that of the umpires on the pitch and the only time the system was of true benefit was when Chris Gayle, West Indies captain, was given out caught behind from a ball that had clipped his thigh pad on 85. He referred the decision and it was overturned. Gayle went on to make a deserved century.
The rest were subject to conjecture. On one occasion the umpires got it wrong, and the video reviewer did, too.
And any team that had two referrals and two batsmen left questioned lbw decisions as a matter of course, because they had nothing to lose, which wasted more time.
Even Test cricket aficionados claimed it made the day frustratingly slow. And cricket is a slow game. If video technology was going to work in any sport it would be cricket.
Football, by contrast, craves velocity. Remove that, delay every dead ball while an unseen elf in a studio hits rewind in a vain attempt to achieve regulatory perfection, and watch excitement levels melt away like last week’s snow. Decision-making in sport is not an exact science. Umpires in cricket rule on what they think the trajectory of a ball would have been, just as football referees consider intangibles such as intent.
In those cases, one man’s opinion is as valid as another’s. A ball strikes a hand in a penalty area, and who can say in all certainty it was deliberate?
The man in the middle thinks the ball would have hit the stumps, but does the man with the television screen know it would? Of course he doesn’t. These are guesses at most. And if we are still left guessing, we might as well keep the game as it is.
Martin Samuel is the chief sports writer of the Daily Mail, where his column appears on Monday and Wednesday