On the Romance of the Cup and Fifa’s comic timing

By: Rob | March 6th, 2010

Got to love the FA Cup. In no other meaningful tournament that I can think of would a team who are currently sitting bottom of their division and staring the going-out-of-business-abyss in the face be the first team in the draw for the Semi-Finals.

What a story it would be if Portsmouth won it. A couple of years ago they won it, amidst some horrendous overspending that has left them in the position that they’re in. The Semi-Finals of the Cup (and the whole being on the brink of going under thing).

Today they beat tough to beat Birmingham, and I couldn’t be happier for them (although I shouldn’t really say that as quite a few members of my family are big Birmingham supporters. Though I’m not sure even they would totally begrudge Portsmouth this)

The game wasn’t without a bit of controversy though as Birmingham has a perfectly good goal disallowed. In unrelated news, FIFA have announced there won’t be goal line technology in football. Ever.

Got to love the timing. Anyway, despite consistent calls from right minded souls, FIFA have ruled out implementing technology into the game.

Obviously, its a big call, and is something they will have thought about for awhile. But I have to say I’m pretty dissapointed. As much as bad calls have become part of the game, they shouldn’t be really. Anything that can be help create a fairer representation of the game is good by me. And anything that might calm down hysteria that we got after the whole Thierry Henry situation would also be nice.

You just know that someone at the World Cup is going to go out in suspicious circumstances. Remember Korea’s controversial run in the 2002 World Cup? If you’re Italian you’re probably still angry about it. Certainly the English are quite good at pointing to the referee as well. see…well most times we’ve gone out of a tournament lately.

I do think video technology would be a really good thing for the game, at least to give it a go and see how it works first. Seems like FIFA would rather just get rid of all the established rules instead.