Very true. There have been so many awful calls that one actually has to reconstruct what the tournament would have looked like had the refs actually done their job. The ONLY option now is technology, the game isn't credible anymore.
If technology is not used after this World Cup, the game has lost all credibility. You give the players a fucking plastic ball to kick around and you give them poor refs. You cannot expect them to perform when all circumstances around them tell them to fuck up. 2010 has been a disaster.
What you're missing is that how the players play really hasn't changed. How the referees officiate really hasn't changed. How the fans at the stadiums watch the matches hasn't really even changed.
The only difference that you're bitching and moaning about is centered exclusively around TV viewers. What the TV viewer sees and experiences has changed dramatically with the advent of pivoting, robotic, multi-angle, slow-motion 3-D cameras that would have required a NASA-like budget decades ago.
While TV revenues are obviously critical for the sport to succeed in a modern society, it really leaves a worse taste in my mouth for the players, referees, and pitch to wind up playing to the cameras instead of to the atmosphere of the actual match in real-life view.
People bitch and moan about the credibility of the sport only because they have the luxury of ridiculous perspectives and the presumption that everything you see on TV in slow motion is more "real" and accurate than anything that happens on the pitch in real time, witnessed by real human beings.
It's for those reasons I think technology isn't so much the solution as the original source of the problem. And to make the game bend over and grab its ankles because we want it to cater to fat, cheese-puff-munching, beer-guzzling, corporate sponsored TV viewers thousands of km from the match would be a net loss for the sport and it's credibility.
Throw on a couple of extra goal line refs if needed for the big money matches. But the rest is pure crap. We may as well have the athletes pack it up and we all watch a televised FIFA 2010 Xbox tournament instead.
Nice.
Are you going to make it to any games?
Yep. Tuesday for Holland-Uruguay.
Bummer that Paraguay lost. I was hoping to go around town here with the chant, "Two Guays, One Cup!!!!"
