Rugby League leads, football follows

Most of us don’t like change. The rules for our favourite sport are fine, good enough for my father and his father before him. This is one of the reasons why the rule makers have to face so much resistance before they have the courage to implement an innovation, which in a very short time is regarded as perfectly sensible.

Rugby League’s move to a summer season caused some near-homicidal threats to the committee who negotiated it with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky 11 years ago, and I’ve noticed there’s been some debate about a similar move in Rugby Union on one of its websites. I can’t see this coming about, but it is to the credit of the Union authorities that they are constantly looking to improve the game as a spectacle by adjusting the rules. Recent years have seen the rucking and lineout laws changed to great effect, and, without going into too much technical detail, more adjustments have been suggested in other areas.

It seems to me, though, that the sport which suffers most from this ‘set in stone’ attitude, is probably the world’s most popular one. Both rugby codes and cricket have for some time now used ‘video evidence’, and ‘Hawk-Eye’ has been adopted by tennis, and will be used for the first time at Wimbledon this year. Why has it taken football so long to follow suit?

There have been several occasions recently when a goal was not awarded when technology would have confirmed it. I am no technician, but I’m sure this could be remedied by an electronic ‘eye’ similar to the one that has been used in service line calls in tennis, which would avoid the hold-up if video replays were used. But, then, would such a hold-up be such a bad thing?