Video referees may not be the answer to football's problems

The Premier League season is just three weeks old, but it is already ticking all the boxes. After Jose Mourinho's tantrums and poor starts to the season for Chelsea and Arsenal, comes the first row over video technology, courtesy of Aaron Ramsey.

The Arsenal midfielder had a goal incorrectly ruled out for offside against Liverpool on Monday, and after the match called for football to take a leaf out of rugby's book.

"At the end of the day we should have been 1-0 up," he said. "To look at a video for 20 seconds would have maybe changed the outcome of the game."

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The Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is already a fan of video referees, but earlier this year Fifa pulled the plug on a Dutch scheme involving a video official in the stadium watching replays and advising the referee on key decisions via a headset, reports the BBC.

Some regard Fifa's decision as typically shortsighted, while others question whether video referees would really put an end of controversial decisions?

"Video assistance can help football and it is scandalous that proper testing has been blocked by Fifa, but the Ramsey decision, indeed, offside calls in general, are a difficult area which show that no system is a panacea," says Matt Dickinson of The Times.

"It will quickly become an anarchic road if referees and linesmen start ducking decisions in the belief that the worst mistakes can always be rectified by the man in the stands."

He draws a comparison with cricket, where umpires rarely call front-foot no-balls, safe in the knowledge that if a wicket falls the legality of the delivery will be checked by the TV official.

Of course, that means a bowler does not know he is overstepping the mark so will not adjust his run until it is too late. And there would be other side-effects in football.

"A goal that has been wrongly permitted is easy to correct; rectifying a wrongly rejected goal such as Arsenal's not necessarily so straightforward," says Dickinson. The play would not have unfolded as it did had the defenders not glimpsed a flag.

"We must ask, too, if the system will affect the decisiveness of officials? If so, could it even change the nature of the game, and teams' tactics?"

Fifa general secretary Jerome Valke may have had a point when he said of video referees: "It's a question of making the biggest decision ever in the way football is played."