Florid Flores

(East London Guardian - February 2014)

West Ham fans are beside themselves with anger over the 3 match ban handed out to Andy Carroll for his alleged ‘assault’ on Chico Flores in the match against Swansea at Upton Park, and quite rightly so.

It seems astonishing that a governing body that prides itself on ‘Respect’ and ‘Fair Play’ can once again ignore evidence that is  put before it  Even if you accept that Carroll’s training arm was intentionally aimed and struck the head of Chico Flores during the match. Video evidence clearly show the arm brushed the top of Flores’ head and was nowhere near his face, and for the defender to roll on the floor clutching his face is cheating – pure and simple. So ban Andy Carroll – perhaps at a stretch, but to let Flores off with not so much as a reprimand? Appalling! Post-match red cards should be given out as well as rescinded. But why wait till the end of the match anyway?

Of course, the issue here is that football’s governing bodies- either at national or international level- are notoriously slow in accepting new technology as a way of enhancing the rules of the game. In Tennis, Rugby and Cricket – to name just three sports – not only has technology been welcomed, it has been proved to have been extremely beneficial - even to the extent of making the games more exciting as spectators watch replays on a big screen.

In football the (poor) argument is that the game is ‘too fast’ to allow stoppages but, while this may be the case in open play, what difference would it make when the game naturally halts. In an offside decision, for example, the play comes to a standstill as the linesman waves his flag or the team celebrates after a goal is scored. What delay is there in not flagging at all for an offside and letting an independent linesman see moments later if the pass was offside or not?

As a reminder of how slow football can be to accept change, consider the time it took to accept goal-line technology. As FIFA began the slow process of asking companies to tender for the technology to decide if a ball had crossed a white line or not, I recall my own attempts to interest Sepp Blatter in something I had myself devised. My ‘invention’ was something I called ‘Tee-Vee’. It’s a little complicated to explain here, but essentially it consisted of a box made of glass and plastic and it sat in the corner of a room and replayed the moments of any match on something I called a ‘Vee-D-O recorder’. I thought it was pretty successful – after all, when Frank Lampard’s ‘goal’ in the 2010  World Cup match with Germany was said not to have crossed the line despite being two yards over, I was able to say with certainty it had before Frank himself had run 30 yards to remonstrate with the referee.

I was astonished when no-one took my invention seriously. Admittedly, my Tee-Vee couldn’t reveal if Geoff Hurst’s goal in the 1966 World Cup final had crossed the line but no technology is 100%.