The joy of scoring a goal for Arsenal gets evaporated in a moment if it is disallowed for offside. The pain doubles if the call is wrong and the goal should have stood. Aaron Ramsey would have felt all these emotions during his disallowed ‘offside goal’ against Liverpool.
In a tight match where both sides looked eager to score the first goal, Ramsey looked set to give the Gunners a ninth minute lead. He collected a Santi Cazorla pass very elegantly and beat Simon Mignolet in the Liverpool goal with a near post finish.
But, the goal was not to be as the Welsh midfielder was deemed offside. Ramsey looked surprised and the replays too showed that the midfielder was played onside by Martin Skrtel.
The goal would have been a winner for the home side but eventually Arsenal had to settle for shared spoils. Would technology have saved us? Ramsey definitely believes so and is rooting for the introduction of video replays.
“I thought I held my run a bit, I thought I was onside but I obviously took a glance over to make sure and saw the flag was up,” Ramsey said.
“The replays suggest I was onside – it should have stood – but obviously the linesman thought it was offside. At the end of the day, we should have been 1-0 up.
“To look at a video for 20 seconds would have maybe changed the outcome of the game.
“I think we could take a leaf out of rugby. They do it really well. You see it on the screens. They go off for 20 seconds and they get the decision right in the end.”
To be fair to the on-field referees, off-side decisions are always football’s equivalent of ‘fighting with fire’. The game is played at such pace that it becomes very difficult to spot off-sides. Having a video replay would definitely help in reducing these errors. But it will also kill the speed of the game. Football is not like Cricket or Rugby where you can pause between decisions – time of which can be used for video referral.
Introduction of replays in football may mean that the players go back from ‘all action’ to ‘no action’; even if it is for a moment of time. Video replay in football may end up hampering the pace of the game.
Do we want that?