Anyone who recalls John McCormick‘s painstaking examination of the statistics last season, and the projections he then made on who would be going down, will be hoping he does not repeat the exercise too early this time and put the fear of God into us. For now, we can appreciate his thoughts on a long-awaited trip to the SoL after what sounds like a holiday from hell in Spain …
It just happened that when M Salut https://safc.blog/?p=46095 was passing on “Untold Arsenal’s findings about referees being biased against Arsenal and towards Sunderland I was dipping into “The future of football: Challenges for the twenty-first century” (Garland et al, 2003). Its final chapter discusses refereeing and its author, Sharon Colwell, should know her onions as she completed a PhD on elite refereeing in 2004.
There’s a debate going on about refs and bias, fomented no doubt by some evil southerner who hates all us northern, whippet-breeding (and maybe also horse punching but that’s not us) working-class, cloth-cap wearers. Or maybe it’s just someone who likes football and puts information and opinion on the web and invites comment, just as we do. (You can judge for yourself by visiting http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/30364)
I suspect it’s the latter and I’d say M Salut said as much, and although some of the material he used may have suggested he was biased, I know we try to be objective and fair, except when baiting Mags and fans from Coventry, Leeds, Cockney or sundry other clubs.
We will never know whether Lampard’s goal might have inspired England to better things in the second half. Germans will counter that we’ll never know about Wembley 1966 either – in each case, of course, the match would have continued at 2-2. ButJeremy Robson has no doubt that such a spectacular error, compounded by the offisde Argentinian goal later, will finally force football to accept the inevitable …
Regardless of what Fifa might have been saying about the use of video technology, it’s a safe bet that there will soon be goal line cameras used to make crucial decisions.
Until now, there have been a host of reasons put forward to halt the use of technology in aiding assistants. The occasional decision in the odd game has never previously considered as providing sufficient weight to the argument for installing the nevessary equipment.