Great bit from the guardian on Stone's goal line clearance.
The world moves on. Technology develops and evolves. The aesthetics of the spectacle, perhaps, to our wearily nostalgic culture, have less to recommend them than they did, but accuracy at least is guaranteed. Where once epoch-defining line decisions were taken by Azerbaijani men with silver hair and splendid moustaches, now we watch a digital representation of a yellow circle landing on a white line across a green background. What Tofiq Bakhramov’s decisive nod was to the 1966 World Cup, so Goal Decision System may be to the 2018-19 Premier League.
Where the former remains contested (with good reason), there is no disputing what happened at the Etihad on Thursday. Or at least not beyond crazed conspiracists who within hours of the final whistle were already talking about shadows and angles and the grand anti-Liverpudlian plot that is geometry. Perhaps the technology isn’t perfect. Perhaps the reading that said the ball was 11.7 millimetres from completely crossing the line is affecting an impossible level of accuracy, but it is still much more likely to be right than a 41-year-old former footballer from Baku.
11.7 millimetres. It’s the length of a bluebottle, the thickness of a pocket diary, the width of the nail of a little finger. It is nothing on which to lose a football match, still less perhaps a championship. And there is a danger now that the measurement comes to haunt Liverpool as surely as Steven Gerrard’s “This does not slip” speech after another game against Manchester City, that when the history of this long title drought is written, the measurement 11.7 millimetres looms so large that every time Liverpool fans see a fly, check an appointment or catch a glimpse of their own hands they are reminded of defeat and failure.
The world moves on. Technology develops and evolves. The aesthetics of the spectacle, perhaps, to our wearily nostalgic culture, have less to recommend them than they did, but accuracy at least is guaranteed. Where once epoch-defining line decisions were taken by Azerbaijani men with silver hair and splendid moustaches, now we watch a digital representation of a yellow circle landing on a white line across a green background. What Tofiq Bakhramov’s decisive nod was to the 1966 World Cup, so Goal Decision System may be to the 2018-19 Premier League.
Where the former remains contested (with good reason), there is no disputing what happened at the Etihad on Thursday. Or at least not beyond crazed conspiracists who within hours of the final whistle were already talking about shadows and angles and the grand anti-Liverpudlian plot that is geometry. Perhaps the technology isn’t perfect. Perhaps the reading that said the ball was 11.7 millimetres from completely crossing the line is affecting an impossible level of accuracy, but it is still much more likely to be right than a 41-year-old former footballer from Baku.
11.7 millimetres. It’s the length of a bluebottle, the thickness of a pocket diary, the width of the nail of a little finger. It is nothing on which to lose a football match, still less perhaps a championship. And there is a danger now that the measurement comes to haunt Liverpool as surely as Steven Gerrard’s “This does not slip” speech after another game against Manchester City, that when the history of this long title drought is written, the measurement 11.7 millimetres looms so large that every time Liverpool fans see a fly, check an appointment or catch a glimpse of their own hands they are reminded of defeat and failure.