Sydney - The advent of video replays in 2006 all but banished the John McEnroe-style “You can't be serious!” tantrums that so appalled tennis umpires and so delighted fans.
Hawk-Eye is amazing: a 250-kilometre-per-hour serve can be freeze-framed to show it actually kicking up the chalk on the line. Contesting a call is a mug's game.
Cricket has wired up its umpires too. Part of the skill of captaincy is now the husbandry of the set number of appeals to the video referee that each side is allowed.
FIFA, football's governing body, remains steadfast in the face of technological advance, arguing that allowing appeals would sap the authority of referees and slow the game down too much.
Rugby league is the top spectator sport in Australia and there is a demand from fans to adopt a GPS-based system that would alert referees to when a player infringed the rule against passing the ball forward.
Bill Harrigan, chief referee with the National Rugby League, told the Daily Telegraph that “if this sort of technology is available, and it takes pressure off referees, I'd be all for it.”
This season fans of the Manly Sea Eagles fretted that a referee missing a forward pass was going to cost them a cup final appearance. As things turned out, the outcome of the game did not turn on one bad decision. As with penalty kicks in football, in rugby league a try resulting from a missed forward pass can decide a game.
Hawk-Eye is about clever camera work. What Canberra-based GPSports System is offering is more sophisticated: a microchip embedded in the ball that through satellite signalling would alert the referee to a forward pass. The signal would first go to the video referee, who could see on a grid on the screen whether the ball was propelled forward.
“It's picking up an error that often the naked eye can't see,” GPSports chief executive Adrian Faccioni said. “A forward pass not picked up by the umpire can change the whole sway of the game.”
The system would register an infraction only when a player threw the ball forward and not when spin on the ball contrives to make it float forward after it leaves the player's hands.
Faccioni said his company, a leader in high-tech sports performance aids which kits out football, rugby and baseball clubs around the world, would have a system ready for the start of the 2013 season.
He is promising accuracy to within a centimetre of how the ball moves on the field.
And his system will be fast, too: it could tip off a referee to an infringement faster than the referee could get to his whistle.
The system is so long in development because of the complexities involved. The company decided it would not oblige clubs to dig up pitches to lay transponders but instead wire up the ball - and wire up the players - so the chances of a mistake were infinitesimal.
“We need to plot not just the ball by itself but where it is in relation to the players and that makes things complex,” the former high-performance coach said. “A second challenge is robustness: the ball is going to be kicked, impacted in tackles and have players falling on it.”
David Gallop, the top rugby league official in Australia, has thrown his support behind the nascent technology.
“If it works then we'd consider it,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “Tracking devices used in cricket and tennis are terrific. Anything that's going to help our game and help our referees is worth looking at.”
The system could bring to an end a practise that has seen referees who miss a forward pass trying to straightening out the ledger later in the game by giving a favourable ruling to the robbed side. - Sapa-dpa