Question Number: 16578

Character, Attitude and Control 9/7/2007

RE: competitive Under 19

robert of san marcos, tx usa asks...

This question is a follow up to question 16530

This is a comment on the question 16530. If you go to a high school football game, there are 5 officials on the field. At higher levels, calls are reviewed on video.
The philosophy seems to be the game has to be called perfectly for it to be fair. Yet, if you follow college football, you know that last season alone there were calls that were upheld after lengthy video review that were clearly wrong, and later apologized for.
Soccer seems to acknowledge that all calls are not going to be perfect. But the game goes on and we deal with it. I happen to believe this philosophy better prepares kids for life.
If the gentleman writer thinks that competitive golf is always going to conform to his idea of fairness, his daughter is in for a rough and disappointing time.

Answer provided by Referee Chuck Fleischer

No, disagree. The philosophy is the authority of the referees is always in question. Even though they do the absolute best they possibly can under the circumstances of dynamic play this is not "good" enough. The opportunity for the chance incorrect decision is too much tor the bean counters who stand to loose a bazzillion dollars should their team not perform to expectations.

So far Association Football still relies on the ability of the single match official to be fit enough and savvy enough to position himself in such a manner as to observe correctly. In the rare instance the referee is not fit enough or knowledgeable enough and is caught being human and making a mistake we all trust he will learn from that mistake. We don't embarrass him and overturn his decision and ruin his credibility in the match even though the television directors constantly run their views of how things should be.

In This Game the beauty of it all is that the three teams present on the field are human and show brilliance and frailties at the same time. We can accept a brilliant striker having a bad shot, a successful defender falling to the floor at the worst time and we can accept an assistant missing an inch of an offside attacker in the melee just before the scoring of a winning goal. These things are human failings. In a perfect world there are no mistakes. Our world is far from perfect and teaching youngsters to change decisions rather than accept the consequences of something they don't agree with is evidence of the sad state of affairs in which we find ourselves living.

Golf is a wonderful game. It pits the individual against himself against the microsecond his club head strikes the ball and if he gets everything in alignment he smiles. If we all played golf that way we would still be playing with the first ball we ever bought...

Regards,

Answer provided by Referee Gary Voshol

I could accept a limited amount of technical enhancments to make our calls better. To qualify, the technology would have to be immediate so the game would not have to wait, and have demonstrated greater accuracy than what is called by the referees using only their senses. For example, the goal-line technology that everyone is talking about, to see whether a goal was scored or not. The problem I have with it though, is that I can't come up with a test that could be completed in a reasonable amount of time, that would prove first that the system worked, and second that the system was more accurate than the referee's eye. There's just not that many goal-line decisions that have to be made to give us enough data points.

I was involved in a robotics competition where the robots shot balls at goals. There was a light and camera system that was supposed to count the goals scored. But it didn't work, it couldn't cope. They had to revert to humans counting the balls as they were scored. And these were balls that were limited to a muzzle velocity of 12 meters per second - soccer balls travel at least 3 times that speed, maybe 5 or 6 times.