The Irish must be hurting right now! They must be...otherwise they wouldn't be ridiculously crying out for a replay of their World Cup playoff qualifier against France!
Maybe if I was in their shoes I'd be doing the same but from the outside looking in, a replay would have disastrous repercussions for football.
Into Extra Time with only minutes left before going to penalty kicks, a long ball comes into the Irish box, and an (offside) Thierry Henry handles the ball twice to keep it in play before squaring the ball into the centre for William Gallas to head home the decisive goal, sending Ireland out of contention for South Africa 2010.
But who's to blame?
In my personal opinion, the referee and his linesmen need to take a fair share of the responsibility. The officials' job is to be in the right place at the right time to be able to make a judgement on any given situation throughout the match! Thierry Henry has been vilified in the press at home and abroad, and for what? All he's done is instinctively raised his hand to keep the ball in play! Yes, that's a foul! Yes, that's a yellow card offence! But d'you know what? It's entirely up to the referee to make that call, and he didn't, because he didn't see it! Thierry Henry is absolutely correct in everything he has said in the aftermath of this result. In my view, he's been honest enough to admit that he did handball it, and I think anyone who has played football and has been in a similar situation where the ball comes at you at speed, there's occasionally an instinctive human reaction to raise your hand to keep the ball under control. You see it more often than you think, it's just that this one was in a major match at a really important time. It's not premeditated, it just happens! And 99 times out of 100, the player will be penalised for it.
All of this could of course have been resolved at the time in a matter of seconds!
UEFA and FIFA have time and time again refused to adopt the use of video technology in football, but unfortunately haven't yet given us a good reason as to why!
Rugby, tennis, cricket, and pretty much all american sports have utilised video refs for a while now, and if it works ok for them, why not the most popular sport on the planet?
Football is such a huge business now, there is so much at stake for winning or losing a match. I heard reports that the Irish economy would now miss out on a €20Billion boost for missing out on qualification!! That's €20BILLION, not million! Not to mention the feel-good factor it would have given the country at a time when they need it most!
Teams are going bankrupt and disappearing off the pages of our Panini sticker albums after being relegated because they can't afford to keep up the payment of players wages etc.
With so much at stake, surely we need to make sure we get the big decisions correct? And without video evidence, match officials are going to continuously take abuse from fans like me for making, let's be honest, human errors that would happen to anyone! So why should the referee suffer? Because of FIFA's refusal to accept modern technology, that's why!
So, back to Paris, in an ideal world, from the point of view of the referee:
"Extra Time, free kick, Henry squares the ball and Gallas nods it into the net. The French players and fans celebrate wildly...but hold on, why are the Irish players all surrounding me so sure that something was wrong? I better quickly check this one out."
The ref makes a TV shape like he's playing a game of charades, gets on his earpiece, and asks the video ref to confirm whether the goal should stand. The video ref checks the replay three times, taking about 20 seconds to make sure, then gets back to the referee saying that no, a free kick should be awarded to Ireland on the touchline and Thierry Henry should be yellow carded for deliberate handball.
Henry is yellow-carded, Ireland take the free kick, the remaining minutes are played out, it finishes a draw, and Ireland then get knocked out on penalties.
But d'you know what?
Nobody complains!
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