All That Glitters Is Not GLT or “Don’t Attend Your Own Funeral as a Guy Named Phil Shipley”
Posted on June 20, 2012 3:23 pm
If a nervous, furtive Hungarian wearing a fake beard and an air of desperation slipped through the back streets of Donetsk, Ukraine in the wee hours of the morning today, ducking in and out of the kind of dark, cheerless bar where anything is available for a price and no one uses their real name, it’s entirely understandable.
He’d be the goal-line official from the England-Ukraine match, and former Nancy Boy Michel Platini wants him dead.
And Platini knows people.
And the reason why this poor schlub might be trying desperately to contact 90 year old ex-Nazi Odessa agents, Vatican officials and Bolivian diplomats to try and arrange passage to South America in the hold of a tramp steamer isn’t because he may or may not have blown a call.
As an experienced international footballing official widely regarded as the favorite in the soon-to-commence race to replace Sepp Blatter as the head of FIFA, the ex-France forward knows that refs blow calls all the time. All that’s required is to shake one’s head sadly for the cameras, make some noises about how taking “the human element out of the game” would be a very, very bad thing and then it’s back to Zurich in time for dinner with the Mrs.
No, the problem isn’t that the Ukrainians may have been shorted a goal. Platini couldn’t care less.
Rather, the problem is that the incident makes Platini look stupid.
Ever since Blatter’s fairly recent conversion to the pro-technology side of he Goal Line argument, Platini has been the main champion of the “human element” position.
It was Platini who announced that the solution to the problem was two extra officials who would stand around doing nothing much of value unless and until there was a close call on a goal.
Euro 2012 was to be the Grand Unveiling of this brilliant plan. Officials were selected and carefully trained. They wouldn’t have flags and they wouldn’t have whistles and they couldn’t call fouls or do much of anything else of value.
They would have one purpose and one purpose only, Platini told us: eliminating the controversy over goal/no goal calls.
A grand theory which took only a little over two weeks to come crashing down on his head while simultaneously making Sepp Blatter look smart.
In fact, just one day earlier Blatter had told a reporter from Reuters that “FIFA cannot repeat the same situation that we encountered with (the England Lampard WC 2010) game.
“I cannot go to the 2014 World Cup without this system.”
At the moment that’s the single best argument against implementing a GLT system: it will mean not having to look at Blatter prancing and preening his way around Brazil. But alas, he wouldn’t keep his word. He’d have to be stone dead to miss out on his last hurrah.
So after the situation yesterday – and I’m still not 100% convinced that the guy got it wrong, but it just doesn’t matter – the IFAB, which is already in a steel cage death match with FIFA to avoid having to surrender at least three of those UK seats so that the President can stuff the board with lackeys, will almost certainly OK some form of GLT for Brazil 2014.
Blatter couldn’t have scripted it any better.
With all that in mind, here’s a quick rundown on the systems FIFA will chose from.
12 companies submitted products. Half were immediately rejected, including one from adidas which had promise but which adidas would not make available to anyone else, meaning that every official match in the world would be required to use an adidas ball. Cute, but FIFA said no.
Of the remaining six, two were approved, meaning that in the end FIFA will be using one of them.
Interestingly, they’re very different.
The really cool one is from Hawk-Eye in the UK, the same outfit that provides the nifty systems that world tennis uses. You’ve probably seen the graphics:
It’s ridiculously complicated, but it’s based on triangulation, using the visual images and timing data provided by high-speed video cameras at different locations around the area of play.
The system uses six cameras to triangulate and track the ball in flight,and then software calculates the ball’s location for each frame by identifying the pixels that correspond to the ball through at least two cameras.
No pauses in the action as with replay video – one of FIFA’s primary criteria – would be required.
Best of all, the graphic would then be immediately available for the TV broadcast as well as in-stadium video boards.
The other system, called Goal-ref, is a lot less sexy.
It involves using a ball equipped with some kind of magnetic jimmerhicky which, they claim, can be installed in any ball:
Sensors installed on the inside of the posts and crossbar send out bursts of electronic waves and when the ball crosses the goal line an audio signal is sent to the referee’s headset.
Hawk-Eye is incredibly expensive but way cool. Goal-Ref is much cheaper and easier but far less fun.
Some people are in fact suggesting that instead of only approving one system FIFA should go ahead and approve both of them.
World Cup, Euro and major qualifying matches could use Hawk-Eye – they might even find a way to force the broadcasters to foot the bill in return for the rights to the images – while other matches could use the simpler (read: cheaper) system.
Either way, thanks to the poor guy currently holed up in a cheap hotel on the wrong side of Donetsk while working on changing his name to Phil Shipley, we’re almost certainly going to be seeing at least one of them very shortly.
The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!!!
I actually liked having the extra ref on the end line. I have no doubt that he got that call right yesterday. However, I realized yesterday that it’s impossible to convince anyone on either side that you did make the correct call. Either side can always raise doubt about split-second goal line calls either way regardless of whatever the truth may be.
As a referee (actually the whole officiating crew), you metaphorically have so many chips to spend as you manage a game. You also want to get something in return when you spend a chip. For example, if a defender makes a wreckless tackle and you book him, you’re spending a chip with yellow card, however you’re getting a calming effect on the game as a whole as the team that suffered the wreckless tackle knows that you’re on top of it and you won’t let such things to unrecognized. That team then keeps playing soccer rather than descending into an endless cycle of retaliation.
Defending a call about a split second crossing of the goal line requires you to basically spend almost all your chips and cannot yield anything in return.
I agreed with Platini before. After seeing the dynamics of that possible Ukraine goal from the referee’s perspective, I am now in favor of goal-line technology. Not because I doubt the ability of that end-line referee to make the right call. But, because I think it puts the refereeing crew in an intractable position having to make that call in the first place. They have enough to manage already, and have been doing it quite well in the Euro tournament.
I don’t know what photos you were looking at, but me and 99% of the rest of the world are pretty sure that was a goal. You and I do agree on one thing – time to let technology make these decisions.
You’re kidding right, Cavan9? How can you say you have “no doubt that [the goal-line ref] got that call right yesterday?” You can clearly see about three inches of daylight between the plane of the goal and the ball on the replays. Hell of a play by Terry, but the ball was over the line. I can stomach Bill’s claim that he’s still not 100% certain the call was wrong (because being 99.9% certain it was a goal is reasonable), but that call gets overturned even under the NFL’s indisputable evidence the call on the field was wrong standard. If the refs are there to measure goals, as Plantini said, and they clearly blew the only really close call yet, what a waste of space they are.
It’s sad that Platini, the all-but-decreed president-elect, is actually trailing Blatter on this one. After years of opposition, Blatter is finally on board with entering the 1990s, and Platini is the one lamenting goal-line technology as wrong. I’m beginning to think that even if Platini has the will to clean up FIFA, he won’t have the brains.
For some reason, I get a strange kick out of Platini’s plans to pack the field with officials, who all look the same in their uniforms and headsets while they prance around. It’s like the scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone in the restaurant is John Malkovich and says only Malkovich. I keep picturing hundreds of officials milling in and around the field mumbling “Malkovich” while clear goals go unnoticed, offsides calls are missed, and dives go unpunished.
I’m not kidding at all. He was four yards away. There wasn’t a camera angle that was perfectly flush with the goal posts and line. Even the bird-eye view was slightly oblique, enough to raise doubt about its credibility.
I don’t get your hating on the officials. Clearly, you’ve never tried to do that job at any level of play. I tried to provide the official’s perspective as best I can even though I’ve never done a pro game, only top-level amateur ones.
No clear goals have gone unnoticed. Offside calls aren’t missed (you call that one! You’d blow it every time. Trust me, it takes practice to be able to watch both the next to last defender and the guy making the pass simultaneously.)
As for dives, it’s often hard to tell a dive versus a guy losing his balance. Trust me, booking a guy who simply lost his balance hurts your credibility with the players far more than simply letting play go on with a borderline dive.
If you want to punish dives, do what MLS is doing by fining/suspending players after the game. The referee can usually tell a foul vs. a non-foul but it’s not always easy to judge intent in real time. The fact that FIFA et al are to chickensh*t to do what MLS is doing says volumes about them. They’d rather say nothing, implicitly blaming the referees.
Think back to that farce of a game in the 2006 World Cup between Portugal and Netherlands. The referee’s main error was listening to Sepp Blatter’s decrees that such and such “must be booked” rather than just going and doing his own game. Of course, when he (naively) followed Sepp’s decrees and the game went south because if you book things the players don’t see as card-worthy, the players start to view the cards as incendiary and arbitrary rather than calming. They actually start roughing each other up because they feel that if they’re going to get carded for all the little stuff that Sepp said, they might as well get a pound of flesh before they go out.
Notice that the Mexican officials were roundly praised that tournament. Also, notice that they didn’t follow any of Sepp’s decrees. They’re used to some self-important poobah who never refereed an under-8 game telling them how to do their game all the time. They knew to ignore Sepp just like they ignore all the other poobahs.
Anyway, back to you RSL. Next time you want to gripe about referees (that are doing a good job so far in the Euro tournament), go out there in the middle of your local men’s league and try to call that game. Maybe then you’ll understand what you’re trying to accomplish when you’re officiating a game. You clearly have no idea what the role of an official is in a competitive soccer game.
Agree. A set of human eyes by definition cannot do the job required in this situation. When positioned outside the frame of the goal, even if standing on the line, preception will not be acute enough to judge whether a ball in the air has completely crossed the line. I have severe doubts that a single camera even could, which is why I am so into the Hawk-Eye solution noted about.
One of the requirements FIFA set down for the testers was “100% accuracy”.
I’m not certain how one defines that except in the context of the tests themselves, but that’s beside the point.
The main functional difference is in situations where there are a large number of players in the goal mouth – and/or a keeper lying on top of the ball – and the problems a camera-based system would have finding the ball.
The engineers claim that the minimum required for an accurate trajectory determination is 25% of the ball seen from just two of the six cameras. They were reportedly unable to come up with a realistic situation where that much of a visual fix was impossible.
On the other hand the Goal-Ref system does not require even that much visual ability. None, in fact.
Sigh. You seem to have missed the point of my post entirely. And you’re just plain wrong about what you assume about me. It’s because I have officiated games and understand the impossibility of the task a ref is asked to do that I posted about the need for technology.
I wasn’t hating on the refs, I was hating on what they’re asked to do. And I was hating on Platini for being naive enough to assume that he could solve the problems of the limits of officiating by throwing a few more refs at the problem. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the very high level officials out there. There are a select few who do an amazing job considering what they’re asked to do and their limtiations. There’s hell to pay whenever you have the kind of situation Croatia/England had, but you never hear about the many calls they get right. Frankly, I’m amazed how often I watch a replay and see that a close offside call was exactly right.
Contrary to what seems clear to you, I was an officially licensed referee and I do have experience with reffing games. It’s damn hard work, as you say. And there are sometimes when it’s just not possible. And that’s the whole point. You could stack all of the officials you want behind the goal, and you’re still not going to be able to see what you can see with hawkeye, what you can see with thousands of frames per second slow motion video. That’s why you’ll never have a perfectly-called game without it. And of course we’ll never have perfection (if there is such a thing) in officiating, but for something as important as whether a goal has been scored, it’s a no-brainer.
As for the goal, I don’t know how you can dispute this picture. The line is the same width as the post, yet you can’t see any of the line beneath the crossbar. That camera, like Platini’s fifth official, is there for exactly that reason. If the angle were off, you’d be able to see the goal line. What you can see is about three inches of daylight between the ball and the plane of the goal. Clearly a goal: http://www.3news.co.nz/VIDEO-John-Terry-goal-save-on-line-England-Vs-Ukraine-Euro-2012/tabid/415/articleID/258357/Default.aspx
I think we’ve found the Hungarian, his name is Cavan9
I can visualise the scandal over Goal-Ref now: Players stuffing their pockets with magnets to get a false positive at the goal line.
I think what they should do is drill a hole on the inside of one of the corners where the Crossbar & Post meets, stick a camera inside and make sure it’s right on the line.
Put a monitor on the table of the 4th official and he can watch the replays to see if the entire ball does cross the line. If it is a goal or not then the 4th official can will tell the ref on his head set. Add 1 minute of stoppage time to the replay automatically.
I think that idea would work wonders.
After seeing that replay more times than I care to remember it appears the ref’s attention is focused on what is going on in front of the goal and by the time he looks in the direction of the goal line it’s too late.
I can this type of human error occuring again and again.
http://static7.businessinsider.com/image/4fe0deae6bb3f70f64000000-960/england-ukraine-goal.jpg
In this still pic, the goal line ref’s head can clearly be seen to be in line with the front of the post, rather than the back. You can even see some white of the goal line, to the right of his head. From his slightly distorted angle, he probably did not see the whole ball in back of the post, and made what he thought was the correct call. Being that close to the post, a few inches can make a big difference in percepeption. Try it with any pole, and move your head 6 inches to either side while focusing on a fixed object on the other side of the pole. Now, further complicate it with a moving ball, and we can see how difficult this call is.
I still don’t like goal line technology. It’s more fun to argue about goals or not goals years later. Why are people afraid of melodrama?
I agree wholeheartedly with not blaming the official himself. It happened quickly, and humans are fallible.
But the official can see his mistake demonstrated after the fact. Platini, apparently, cannot.
This is a witch hunt on the wrong officials The guy that SHOULD be under the microscope is,the AR that blew the even MOREMobvious offside call that lead up to the “goal”.
they should do what they do in long jump, have a strip of plasticine or molding clay covering the area of the goal just beyond the line and then if there is a dent in it, on inspection by the line judges, then it is a goal, else not a goal.
that idea is free and open source. take care of it and see you in brazil!
The ball sensor technology cannot be as simple as they like to tell us. For a goal to be scored, the whole of the ball must cross the whole of the line, so where does one place sensors to make sure this is accurate? Dead centre of the ball, and one radius of the ball inside posts? On the surface of the ball and back edge of the post?
Hawkeye is brilliant for tennis, but it is not instantaneous in cricket, where the ball is being hit at the moment of decision, (it is hence mainly used for lbw, which depends on following where the ball would have gone if not blocked). Can Hawkeye, with any number of cameras answer the question when half a dozen players are trying the play the ball (and two or three may succeed).
I think we need the trials and we need them quickly. I am not certain we will have a success.
Most games do not have a goalmouth incident where this technology will come in. Most games do have disputed offsides, some of whihe lead to disputed goals. Once we have some technology, this question is bound to come to the fore.
And then the question, is it a foul? The laws of the game say that a foul is a foul if the referee thinks its a foul (well not in those words). People argue this one endlessly on TV and the radio. There will never be an end to controversy
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