Hahnemann's right, up to the line

Marcus Hahnemann has a point.

A lone voice in defense of the ubiquitously-ridiculed awarding of a phantom goal to his Reading team on Saturday, the Seattle native has argued that any number of officiating mistakes can change the course of the game over 90 minutes, so that ordering a replay every time there is a game-changing error is just impractical.

That is true. Changing the score retrospectively to 2-1 to Watford instead of 2-2 would also be madness because the game’s narrative was changed after the imaginary opener. A replay would be the only fair course of action, but as the Football League confirmed, a provision for that does not exist in its constitution. So the referee’s wacko or cruel decision is final, for now at least.

Yet imagine this had been a World Cup final instead of an early-season Championship clash. Wouldn’t FIFA be hastily convening a meeting on the use of video, if not replaying the game? Is soccer the only major sport that refuses to use cameras? Ironically the one piece of technology the game has adopted, the match officials’ mikes and earpieces, was to blame for Saturday’s calamity. And this madness will happen again sooner or later, because Watford and Reading are not Chelsea and Manchester United, whose forgettable 1-1 draw a day later earned far more column inches in today’s papers.

I would draw at line at challenging offside calls only because Hahnemann’s warnings of a stop-start game might come true. But surely the use of video replays for goal-line decisions is long overdue, as an experiment at least. As Watford captain Jay DeMerit, who led the on-field protests, told me yesterday,

“Either you take a minute checking the video replay, or waste two minutes with all the players arguing about it.”

-Sean O’Conor