Criticism
While advocates for goal-line technology maintain that it would significantly reduce refereeing errors during play, there are also criticisms of the technology. Much of the criticism comes from within FIFA itself including FIFA president Sepp Blatter. Apart from the criticisms revolving around the technical aspects of the two proposed technologies, critics point out that such technology would impact on the human element of the game and remove the enjoyment of debating mistakes. Sepp Blatter has been quoted as saying "Other sports regularly change the laws of the game to react to the new technology. ... We don't do it and this makes the fascination and the popularity of football".
A study suggested that in the 2010–11 Premier League season "errors took place nearly 30% of the time that video replays could help prevent", but some people claim that instant replays would interrupt the flow of the game and take away possible plays.
Other critics believe it would be prohibitively expensive to implement the technology at all levels of the game and particularly for smaller/poorer football associations. FIFA officials have expressed a preference for 'better refereeing' as well as more match officials over implementing the technology. Advocates in turn cite the many examples of incorrect goal-line decisions deciding important games and point out that the technology has improved much since the initial trials carried out by FIFA. Advocates contend that any extra help for the referee should outweigh arguments that it would lead to non-uniform rules (since not all football associations would be able to implement it).
Blatter had been opposed to goal-line technology until Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal in the 2010 World Cup. He now says that the technology could be in place by the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. UEFA president, Michel Platini will likely oppose the plan, and instead propose additional referees beside each goal.
The introduction of the so-called "fifth official", i.e. the extra assistant referee standing beside the goal-line, was partly in order to facilitate in such situations.
Read more about this topic: Goal-line Technology
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)