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ers). Because games are so often decided by a single goal and so much depends not just
on the imperfect skills of the competing teams but also on the imperfect skills of the ref-
ereeing team, it's all too common to see a result against the run of play. I suppose it all
comes down to the clunkily digital, almost binary nature of the scoring system.
The tallying system in a game like rugby, for example, with its multitudinous points,
makes unfair results less likely. There are still refereeing mistakes and instances of un-
fairness, and you still see the occasional iffy result gained more on luck than on skills
prevailing on the day, but the mistakes tend not to have quite such a potentially crucial
effect on the game, and manifestly contrary results are fewer.
And I do think they should have a fourth referee watching replays on TV, wherever
possible. Some disagree, taking a purist line on this, saying that by not using this tech-
nology the spirit of the game is preserved; it means that everybody is playing under the
same rules, throughout the world and at every level, whether it's a season-end Sunday
League match after all the consequential stuff has been decided or the final of the World
Cup.
Yes, but. The whole point is that the result of one match matters to a few tens or hun-
dreds of people while the other matters to hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions,
and the vast numbers of people sitting at home watching a replay showing a piece of
blatant fouling that's gone unpunished, or an innocent action that was falsely awarded a
card, can plainly see that an injustice has been committed (you could ban TV companies
showing replays, but people would just use their video recorders). If you can use techno-
logy to prevent that, when it is so cumulatively important, then you should.
People hate injustice; a very large part of what society is all about - what civilisation
is all about - is protecting the innocent, letting people just get on with their lives and
their livelihoods, and either deterring people from doing bad things to others, or punish-
ing them if they do. When we see a perfectly good, legal tackle in the penalty box which
the tackled player responds to by taking a dive, getting the defender sent off and gaining
a penalty, and it's all shown in forensic, repeatable detail in front of us (and especially if
this decides the match), the sense of outrage we feel is about a lot more than football.
Compromising the purity of the game's spirit is a small price to pay, and besides, as
soon as the concept of the professional foul was introduced, the moment footballers began
to be traded for money, the instant that the first club became a quotable commodity on a
stock exchange, the essential purity of the game, its rules and spirit were already just a
long gurgling noise issuing from somewhere deep down the pan.
We discuss waiting for the Third Division trophy to arrive - apparently there's been a
helicopter on standby waiting to take the cup to wherever it was needed - but then the
rain starts (not that the Morton players notice - they're already soaked with champagne)
and so we leave.