When England’s Frank Lampard launched a ball that hit the crossbar and clearly bounced over the goal line against Germany in a Round of 16 match in the World Cup, the only sounds were the bleating of the ever-present vuvuzelas and howls of outrage over FIFA’s longstanding opposition to goal-line technology.
Paul Hawkins, the inventor of the Hawk-Eye system used at many tennis tournaments and cricket matches, posted an online open letter to Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president, making a renewed case for using Hawk-Eye in soccer — specifically on goal lines — to certify whether a ball has cleared the line.
“There are no sound technical reasons to say it won’t work,” Hawkins said in a telephone interview from London. Referring to Blatter, he added: “Anyone trying to make a decision about technology shouldn’t try to understand it; he just needs to know that it does work, not how. Leave that to the scientists.”
Hawkins said that his goal-line system had undergone successful testing for several years in England at the Fulham and Reading clubs. But any alteration to soccer’s rules must be approved by the International Football Association Board, which meets once a year and includes representatives from the four nations that comprise the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales), as well as representatives from FIFA. Last year, the board decreed a cessation to all technology trials, including ones using a so-called smartball, one with a computer chip embedded. Instead, Michel Platini, the leader of UEFA, the sport’s governing body in Europe, approved the use of two additional officials behind the goal lines during last season’s Europa League tournament.
That appeared to be the most recent end to the technology discussion, until Lampard’s shot was judged not to have crossed the line. After days of criticism, Blatter said that he and FIFA would reconsider high-tech answers after a World Cup rife with embarrassing errors by referees.
“They are against technology because they claim it is a more pure sport, officiated by humans,” Hawkins said. “Mistakes are part of the allure of the game.”
He added: “There’s an argument that controversy is good for the game, that mistakes are part of it and that this incident proves the case. People say the 1966 final was good for the game because people are discussing it 40 years later. But no one discusses whether the Lampard incident was a goal or not. It has undermined the credibility of the event.”
According to the Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd. Web site, the system uses an array of cameras that feed information to a bank of computers, which forward the data to a central computer that determines if the ball has crossed the goal line. Within 0.5 seconds, a signal is transmitted to the referee’s earpiece or wristwatch.
The Hawk-Eye system, which is used in all four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, will again be presented to the I.F.A.B. at its meeting later this month, Hawkins said. It could be tested at the 20 stadiums of the English Premier League, or another league, like Major League Soccer, but could probably not be implemented widely for another two or three years, with I.F.A.B. approval, Hawkins said.
“We’d be happy to do some trial cases, not rules of the game or something like that, but with an additional referee or technology,” Sunil Gulati, the president of the United States Soccer Federation, told reporters in South Africa after the England-Germany game.
By JACK BELL
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