Why World Cup must learn from the NFL and bring in instant replay

When Sepp Blatter sits down for the Extraordinary Meeting of the Fifa executive committee here today, he should have one document and one document only in front of him.

The Fifa president should distribute it to his cohorts before they begin to agonise anew over the embarrassment caused by the blatant Thierry Henry handball a fortnight ago that deprived the Republic of Ireland of a place in Friday's World Cup finals draw.

On the cover page of this document, which would list the ways that the use of video replay would have wiped out so many of the ugly injustices that are disfiguring football, five words should be written: How The NFL Does It.

And before the discussion starts, Blatter should quote Mike Pereira, the architect of American Football's successful video replay system, to dispel the claims of football traditionalists that its implementation would do more harm than good.

"Video replay has baled us out of making mistakes that would have had a major impact on game after game," Pereira told me yesterday.

"I would rather give up the 3 minutes it takes to make the right decision with video replay than spend the next three months talking about a wrong decision."

Out of respect to Fifa, Pereira did not want to talk directly about the simple steps soccer could take to put an immediate stop to the epidemic of refereeing controversies that have begun to ruin our game.

But listening to him outline the benefits video replay has bought to the NFL, it made it tantalisingly obvious how easy it would be for soccer to follow suit without compromising the game.

Pereira, now the NFL's Vice President of Officiating, hinted at a future where Sir Alex Ferguson would be unable to blame the referee every time Manchester United failed to win a match.

And at a game where the referees had sunk back into anonymity and the players were the people we were talking about after every match.

"We don't want people talking about officiating," Pereira said. "Our goal is to talk about the game and the players, not the officiating.

"The game changes. Athletes change the game. They are bigger, more skilful, stronger, faster. That makes them harder to officiate.

"So you have to use every tool you have to make sure the game is decided by players not officials. You want players to be the ones influencing the game, not officials.

"When any sport first takes on video replay, you are going to have the purists who say it ruins the flow of the game and stuff like that but, like everything else, when you get into it, it is forgotten about.

"Technology is a challenge but we should not be afraid of it. We have to improve it and keep pace with it. We are more exposed than we have ever been, so embrace it and use it to your benefit.

"We need to do everything we possibly can to make sure the integrity of the game is unquestioned. If that means a system that allows you to correct clear mistakes, then adjust and do it because there is too much involved in the game to pretend it won't work."

The NFL video replay system is relatively simple. Each of the two opposing coaches is allowed to challenge two decisions per match. If a challenge is subsequently disallowed, the coach's team loses a time out, an important advantage in American Football.

If the system was introduced in soccer, the equivalent might be the loss of one of a team's three substitutions.

Once the challenge is made, the NFL referee has 60 seconds to watch the instant replay of the play and decide if the original call was correct.

The referee must see "incontrovertible visual evidence" for a call to be overturned. Note, too, that it is the referee who makes this decision, not an official sitting in the stands.

"When the video replay system was first introduced in 1986," Pereira said, "all the video reviews were done by a video assistant who was usually a retired official.

"It took responsibility out of the hands of the match officials and they resented that. We abandoned that system in 1991 but when we reintroduced video replay in 1999, we made a change.

"We put a monitor on the field and the referee and his crew had the final decision as to whether a call should be reversed. It still empowered the officials to make the decision but it gave them a second look.

"Surely, it doesn't matter whether you're a referee in soccer, the NBA or the NFL, you don't want to make a bad call. When you have got technology, the referee walks off the field a happy guy because he's not walking off knowing he's made a mistake."

The coaches, generally, are happy, too. They don't abuse the system because they know there are penalties if their challenge is not successful. They only make an average of 1.2 challenges per game.

And the spectators? Well, all the evidence is that the drama and the suspense of the video replay system has added to their enjoyment, not taken away from it.

It is not as if delays for a challenge are interminable. Pereira said the average is 3 minutes and 20 seconds, little more than it takes to treat an injury.

In the wake of the Henry incident, in the wake of so many similarly avoidable controversies, most people now accept that it is time for football finally to embrace new technology.

There are still a few cavemen out there - most of them apparently in the higher echelons of Fifa - who are hung up on the idea that football is the one sport in which video replay wouldn't work.

They cite tortuously complex scenarios to back up their case, usually involving what could happen while a decision is being made on a challenge, but the simple truth is that none of these scenarios would be problematic using a form of the NFL system.

If there's a disputed penalty claim, for instance, the manager would have five seconds to throw on his red flag or keep it in his hand. Play is either stopped or not. If the manager makes his challenge, there is no time for another move to develop.

The system would have wiped out the William Gallas goal that followed Henry's handball. It would have wiped out Diego Maradona's Hand of God goal in 1986.

For most of us, that's enough to implement it as soon as possible. Most of us reached the tipping point a long time ago. It has got to the stage with video replay in football now where it's a simple choice.

If you want to perpetuate injustice in the game, oppose it. If you don't, back it.

Go Figure

60 - the number of seconds an NFL referee is allowed to watch a video replay and make a decision on a challenge

200 - the average amount of seconds it takes for NFL officials to stop the game, view a video replay, make a decision, announce it to the crowd and restart the game.

1.2 - the average number of challenges per game that an NFL coach makes. He is allowed 2.

300 - number of challenges NFL coaches make per season.

35 - percentage of refereeing decisions overturned by the official after a challenge and when he has studied video replay.

6 - number of seconds the average NFL play lasts

40 - number of seconds the ball is dead between plays in the NFL, on average.

0 - number of refereeing controversies in the NFL.