Roll it there, Sepp: Football vs. Robocop

The forlorn figure of the modern umpire has been a melancholy feature of the ongoing Cricket World Cup. Once a marble monolith of reason – King Solomon in a floppy hat – today's umpire is an apologetic, anachronistic half-presence amid the sugar-surge of powerplays and flashing bails.

Constantly undermined by an ever-expanding array of technological “aids”, the modern umpire is compelled to question and overturn his own decisions in full public view, like the hapless subject of a Maoist struggle session. It all makes for a frustrating and anti-climactic viewing experience, a form of sporting coitus interruptus, whereby every thrill is conditional and the game is deprived of its ecstatic spontaneity – the essence of all sport.

Those who clamour loudest for video technology in football claim that “getting the right decision” is crucial to the integrity of the game. Such pedantry is tone-deaf to the real appeal of sporting contests, which derive their integrity from the complex interplay of human prowess and emotion, demanding only to be refereed fairly, consistently and (no technological solution for this one) with a modicum of cool common sense. Denying football its human element reduces the game to a mere accounting exercise, its outcome determined by rigidly enforced binary parameters.

FIFA, as an organisation, is a more complex beast than the villainous caricature depicted in the anglophone media (or, at the very least, a more nuanced evil). Its staunch and long-standing resistance to the RoboCopping of football, in the face of ceaseless braying from incompetent Premier League managers and their corporate overlords, has been rather subtly heroic.

The world body did, of course, relent and submit in time for the 2014 World Cup, at which goal-line technology was introduced, largely in response to the Great Bloemfontein Swindle of 2010 (which saw England cheated out of a 4-2 defeat when Frank Lampard's goal evaded the attention of a referee's assistant).

Thus it was, that, on the 15^th of June 2014, a new dawn of technological enlightenment settled over Estadio Beira-Rio in Porto Alegre, as France tussled with a dogged and ferocious Honduras. With the French leading 1-0, Karim Benzema's shot ricocheted off Noel Valladeres's upright, then off the goalkeeper himself, activating the Bond-esque gadget on referee Sandro Ricci's wrist. Ricci pointed decisively to the centre-spot, feeling perhaps the fleeting frisson of super-human omnipotence that caused Roy Batty such anguish in Blade Runner.

The consternation unleashed in the BBC commentary box by this decision – and the clarificatory graphics on the stadium's big screen – was exquisite to behold. A Beckettian duologue ensued between commentator Jonathan Pearce and sidekick Martin Keown, the two men gibbering at irreconcilable cross-purposes as Pearce's psyche disintegrated live on air. The boisterous microphone-muncher was reduced to a seething cloud of existential rage, unable to distinguish between two immediately adjacent points in space and time, and beginning, one sensed, to question the nature of reality itself.

It's worth reflecting on this shambolic début of goal-line technology, because it encapsulates much of the flawed and philistine thinking behind the entire concept. Hard cases make bad law, say apologists for both, but the inverse is also true. In the split-second after Benzema's shot bounced off Valladeres, the goalkeeper managed to claw the ball back from (allegedly) just over the goal-line, before any of the millions of eyes trained on him, and him alone, could tell for certain whether it had crossed. By any honest conception of natural sporting justice, Valladeres had kept the ball out. In a game played by, for and between humans, his action had defeated the capacities of human perception, only to be annulled by an inscrutable exchange of 1s and 0s.

While human officials' errors are apparent to all on slow-motion replay – as is the consistently astonishing accuracy of their offside calls – automated systems presuppose a huge dollop of faith in the correct configuration of both hardware and software (something 99% of spectators would be unable to verify, even with access to the proprietary code).

Football's status as the world's favourite sport owes much to its intuitive immediacy. Its histrionic American cousin is structured, organised and regulated specifically to produce Hollywood-style plot-lines; the all-or-nothing championship showdown, the last-second Hail Mary pass. Unsurprisingly, American football has embraced video replay as a direct equivalent of the slow-motion climax, just in case you missed the Disney epiphany between fistfuls of popcorn.

None of these objections should be understood as a generalised Luddite dismissal of sporting technology (although it's worth studying exactly who the Luddites were, and what they stood for; we could use a little of their righteous zeal today). The introduction of vanishing foam at the last World Cup, more than a decade after its first appearance in South America, was an overdue embrace of an ingenious device which quickens the flow of the game rather than stopping it dead. Likewise, there is no reason football referees should not be mic'd like their rugby counterparts, save for the appalling verbal abuse to which they are habitually subjected (and which public scrutiny would do much to abate).

A difficulty sometimes encountered by the TV umpire in cricket is the tendency of crucial events – the impact of ball on pad or bat on ground – to fall between frames of footage, offering a frozen high-definition portrait of the moments before and after, but not of the incident itself.

It's here that the visionary Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein makes a rare foray onto the field of play, Fellaini-esque hairdo billowing as the fourth official dubiously eyes his studs. Eisenstein pioneered a style of frenetic montage which seems superficially familiar in an era of seizure-threatening music videos. There was, however, a crucial difference; Eisenstein's edits were literal cuts, lengths of film spliced rudely together, in contrast to the clean, clinical rapid-fire transitions possible with modern editing software. The impurities left on the film by Eisenstein's physical process engender a giddying sense of speed, of things happening too quickly for the human eye and brain to fully comprehend.

Does this mean that old film stock is a superior medium to digital storage? No - that would be an idiotic and atavistic opinion. It does remind us, however, that much of what's valuable and exhilarating and significant about sport happens, as with cinema, between the frames – in the fugitive, intangible process whereby one instant segues into another. Yanking the film from the projector and shoving it under a microscope illuminates nothing about the film as a whole. The manic dignity of football deserves to be protected from the pedantic savagery of the techno-barbarians.