I think it would slow the game down terribly. In Tennis there are natural breaks anyway, so it doesn't interrupt the flow. Also you would get teams challenging for the sake of it and disrupting the game.
What are you talking about? You sound like Blatter. There are just as many breaks in football where nothing is happening as tennis. Ballboys getting balls for throw-ins or corners or goal kicks. Substitutions. Dawdling over free kicks, goalkicks, corners or throw-ins. Wasn't there stat released a few years ago that in a 90 minute game the ball is only actually in play for about 50-60 minutes? A hawk-eye decision would take 10 seconds. About the same time it takes some players to go down clutching their face after having their ankles stroked.
Anything that adds stoppages to the game should be binned immediately. The beauty of football is it's a fast paced game. Unfortunately that sometimes leads to errors, by players and referees. It's all part of the game though and mistakes have happened since day one. Yes, if we could help refs without stopping the game the. Let's do it. You can.point to ****e like rugby and tennis as much as you like, there's a reason billions follow football compared to other sports.
These natural pauses take up over 25% of the playing time. So what difference would a max of 6 x 10 second pauses make to that? None. And to suggest that football is more popular than rugby because there are less pauses is nonsensical.
It's one of the many reasons it's not just more popular. Rugby just doesn't compare at all, nor does tennis or cricket. All dull sports with small fan bases, bar cricket who's numbers are swelled by India. Footballs fine how it is. Any extra stoppages will be to many, as you say, 25% of playing to,e is already lost. We should be looking to reduce that not in these it.
The difference is that in Tennis, cricket and rugby there are natural and frequent stoppages - usually after an incident. Whereas in football, a stoppage might not happen for 2 or 3 minutes after a contentious incident, where do you stop the play to discuss this? For example a player may or may not be offside - do you stop the play as soon as the ball is played, possibly stopping a goal scoring opportunity, or do you stop it after the attack as finished, possibly stopping a counter attack, or a 2nd attack - what if (like Arsenal) the team don't shoot straight away but probe around the box, stretching the defence until an opening is created - stopping the play then would benefit the defence and not the attack. If you stop it when the ball goes out of play, it's fine if they shoot (and miss/score) straight away, but what if it's not for 2-3 minutes, do you discount all the play in those minutes and bring the play back to the original incident. What if someone scores in that time?
If you added in the stoppages for reviews etc, then the actual playing time would drop even further. If you stopped the clock completely to accommodate stoppages, then you'd end up with something akin to NFL, where a 60 min game takes around 3 hours to complete.
I thought about what Piskie said earlier. People may use the challenges for tactical gain rather than for legitimate reasons. And because football only has 1 break, it would be considered impractical to both the game as well as advertisers. I'm sure there's a compromise that could be made. Like the referee can accept challenges at his discretion. They would have a team sitting in a room reviewing the replay asap and giving the referee an answer. They wouldn't take more than 20-30 seconds surely. We already have stoppages when the referee consults his linesmen... this wouldn't be much more time consuming. Saying that it's just part of the game is silly. If football is an ever evolving game, the technology should compliment those sentiments, not be resistant to them.
In tennis they do stoppages even during plays, when a lot is on the line as well, and it does nothing to slow the game down. As Sign said, they can have a team ready, and just like tennis, immediately put the replay on slow motion on the big screen and that's it. As for teams using this to time waste, there's already many other forms of time wasting, doubt a team will want to use this as a form of time wasting because it hurts them in the end since they might need that replay to help them when it counts.
If we're afraid of time wasting, then we might as well get rid of substitutions, teams sometimes literally take up around a minute to make a sub, so what's the difference? Or even goal celebrations, you always lose more than 1 minute with goal celebrations, and many many other things.....So if it's a Q of time being ticked away, there's already so many things that do that, but we don't have a problem with having them as part of the game....Well having video technology should be just as important and part of the game based on all the **** ups we have seen in the last 2 weeks! Forget about the last 2 years.
How it will work: Walcott runs onto a ball from Ozil, slots it in, we celebrate, thinking it's a goal, but linesman says nope it's offside, we however think no it's onside....So we decide to make a challenge, the captain has to be the one who approves it from the team, and then the manager gives the ok. A team reviews it quickly in real time along with everybody else on a big screen in slow motion. This can also be done in reverse, with team X complaining that team Y's goal was offside and should not count, and so video replay is used to prove it was offside. These are the cases where it will be done, or for penalties etc, this is where you get most controversy and where people want technology to be used. Play has already been stopped in most of these cases anyway, with or without replays. When a team scores an offside goal, play is stopped for them to celebrate, when a team scores a goal that's ruled offside, play is stopped for the ball to be put back in position and restart play. So even technically no play is being stopped. The same with a penalty, when someone goes down diving and is given a penalty, play is stopped. What about when a penalty which should be given isn't, and the opposing team just carries on, what must be done in that case? Well, we can either say yes the team that feels hard done by can stop play and call for a review, or we can say that for video review to happen, play must be stopped and then video technology can be consulted, if play is not stopped, then it cannot be used to stop and interfere in play. See? Very easy. It's not complicated, you can ALWAYS find a solution.
You could limit its use only to goals scored/disallowed. Any other cock up by the ref would just have to be lived with. So if the ref blows for offside just before a simple goal can be scored, then no challenge.
I agree it is very easy to implement. If anything, it would add to the drama of the event, like it does with cricket and their referral system. I really don't understand peoples aversion to it. This is a necessary evolution to the game, which would help the Ref and reduce controversy.
Cricket was plagued with controversies of many cases of blatant home cooked decisions. The referral system successfully eradicated this from the game. We see plenty of cases of biased home town decisions and big team pressures on refs, a perfect case in point was the Bournemouth v Liverpool game where Liverpool got the lions share of decisions. The reffing was so bad that Bournemouth got a perfectly good goal disalowed and Liverpool got a clear off-side decision ok'ed. The new system would stop this and justice would be done.
