While England's World Cup squad and specifically Frank Lampard (and all those before) continue to awake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, thoughts tractor-beamed back to Bloemfontein in a familiar moment of anxious praxis, Monseigneur Michel Platini continues to wax poetic, even going so far as to mention our favorite gaming device, as he makes his stance abundantly clear concerning goal-line technology. Didn't we all agree it was time for something else?
While football trudges forward after a World Cup where referees continued to fall prey to the human element, Platini, in an unprecedented display of overwhelming support, has pledged an additional man behind the goal for Champions League contests after its success in last season's Europa League, his doctrine to combat Kubrick's Paths of Glory molasses trenches, or simply, whether or not an inflatable apple made of synthetic leather has in fact crossed a line of children's sidewalk chalk.
Less than a week after FIFA pledged to stand with a magnifying glass over the goal line to scientifically asses the roll of the ball, Mr. Prat-,.um, Platini has reiterated his opposition to the idea of goal-line technology stating its implementation into a game so perfect would turn the beautiful game into "Playstation football".
While it's widely regarded that one man, due to speed, sound or the inability to take ones eyes off the WAGs in row 3, needs that something extra to 'get it right', Platini continued to stress his reluctance as it pertains to the moving picture camera and again highlighted the idea of additional warm bodies on the field of play, or close by, to effectively call a match. D.W. Griffith, we apologize.
"One referee is not enough, not in the modern era where you have 20 cameras", sighed Platini. Then, in a moment of idiosyncratic self realization not realized, Platini ho-hums, "It is unfair, the camera can see everything (say what!?) but the referee only has one pair of eyes. Every time he makes a mistake, those cameras are there to focus on it".
"It is why we have added two assistants for Champions League games this season. It is a logical step with so many cameras that can pick up incidents: the more eyes there are to assist the referee, the better the chance of spotting those incidents".
But while Platini attempts to play a numbers game and stresses the idea of extra eyes being able to catch game changing instances to subsequently stamp them out like drug use among teens in the D.A.R.E. program, his inability to embrace modern technology in it's simplest form, more specifically goal-line technology, even more specific, whether or not the ball crossed the line, may still prove his downfall.
Yet what of the idea of another man behind the goal to assist the first man who missed the ball travel over the line? Will his positional sense remove the human element of mistake from the game as we know it? Did the linesman in the France v Ireland World Cup playoff miss anything substantial during his time directly adjacent to the goal mouth? Humans are flawed, the modern game is fast and unforgiving, remember that.
Call it coincidence, call it a Freudian slip, but Platini in all his wax on, wax off moments of inspiration, mentions the use of cameras more than once in his anti-camera rhetoric. While American Football with all its start-stop, bloated, commercial-laden, Sunday afternoon 5 hour marathon presentations continues to 'get it right' with their version of video review, the right answer to soccer's at times flaw may lie somewhere between the stratosphere and the troposphere.
Realizing it's not black or white and a work in progress it needs to be, the simple ability to decipher whether or not the ball has crossed the line surely is a question wherein the answer is right in front of our faces.
