James Lawton: We have the technology, so why not utilise it?

Both rugby codes and cricket have benefited from the use of TV replays, but football continues to live in the blinkered past

Back in the Sixties, Prime Minister Harold Wilson talked on and on about the white heat of technology, which for older Crystal Palace fans must be another source of angst this week,

Instead of the electronic eye which could so easily, and cheaply, have announced that Palace had scored a goal of absolute legitimacy against Leeds United on Sunday they had the imperfect vision of the referee, Dermot Gallagher. Instead of white heat they had a dense fog. Instead of Cyclops, Mr Magoo.

It really isn't good enough. Not in 2003. Not when the whole game is now being played for the benefit of television viewing figures, and being besieged with all kinds of fancy Player-Cam type gimmickry. Press the red button, they say, and follow every move and scratch and spittal volley of an individual player. But what button do you press when your team, the object of all your dreams, does the hardest thing in the whole game and scores a goal and is then waved away to try again.

Tommy Black's "goal" for Palace, even the Leeds manager, Terry Venables, admitted it, didn't even vaguely occupy the ground of Sir Geoff Hurst's second goal at Wembley in the 1966 World Cup final. All over the land you could see it on the television screen with the naked eye. You could see it in every television household. You could see it through a fug of cigarette smoke in a pub. For quite some time Palace fans will have it before their eyes when they wake up.

No wonder the Palace manager, Trevor Francis, seemed close to bursting a vein. You put in a week's work. You keep your team in balance between the high of beating Liverpool at Anfield and the reality of the work that it will take to reproduce the effort against Leeds. You see your lads take one on the chin, and then come back swinging. You see them get back into the game with a real goal, the product of excellent, aggressive work, and then you hear the referee say he didn't get a clear view of the incident. It doesn't help when one of television's multi-angle option shots shows you the official enjoying what looks an uninterrupted line of vision.

Maybe Gallagher didn't see it. But the camera did. Then there were re-runs, the endless, mind-bending re-runs. What should it matter to the referee that a television camera will always have such superior vision? But apparently it does. It takes away a certain god-like status. Surely that particular nonsense has gone on for too long. The game matters more than the illusions and the pride of the man with the whistle.

Francis was banging on about how many millions the incident would cost Palace. Fair point, but not half as relevant as the one that a game had been utterly distorted.

On the balance of evidence, the odds were that Leeds would have probably got back into the game. Harry Kewell is playing with much of his old panache and after putting what passed for an England team to the sword at West Ham on Wednesday night, his Aussie blood was plainly still up on Sunday afternoon. Another irrelevance, however.

Football should understand that, if it has the means, it should ensure the integrity of every match – at every level. Intangibles will always be part of sport which is an aspect of its beauty. But intangibles born of inefficiency and illogic should be swept away.

Cricket and both rugby codes do it with conspicuous success. Sunday's Six Nations match at Murrayfield was rescued from a potentially match-changing flaw after 21 seconds. The referee suspected there was a knock-on before Brendan Laney touched down. He called in the video official and with minimum delay Scotland's try was invalidated – and Ireland, much the better team, went on to win. Who knows what might have happened if the Scots, before their own people, had been given the encouragement of such an early, albeit spurious score?

For more than a quarter of a century, ice hockey in North America has had the simplest device to prevent the kind of injustice which overtook Palace. When the puck crosses the goalline a light flashes. A goal has been been scored. The players skate off to restart the game. In the Sky studio two old pros, George Graham and Alan Shearer, applied the most basic of logic. If the technology exists, why not use it? Nothing is worse than scoring a perfectly good goal and then having it wiped away.

Referees say that the human element will always be a factor in football. True, but only to the extent that football administration is feeble enough to let it. A goal is a goal and, whenever it is possible, it should be seen to be so.

The fire still burns bright inside Ferguson

No doubt the competitive rage of Sir Alex Ferguson has known more profitable occasions than last Saturday afternoon, when the boot, which was fortunately unoccupied, he kicked across the Old Trafford dressing room smacked into David Beckham's face.

But still I don't go along with the idea that the tyrant of Old Trafford, Govan's answer to Caligula when results go wrong, is showing any signs of losing the plot. Fergie's plot is written in the blood of the football ages. Yes, perhaps, at the age of 61, it would been more seemly, and less hazardous to Beckham, if he had been able to take the broad view, and to have retreated into his office, as his great predecessor Sir Matt Busby used to do, pour himself a wee dram, and reflect on the football verities.

He could have said that the breaks simply didn't happen for his team. That hard though they tried, they were unable to re-shape a game that had been so devastatingly moulded against them by Ryan Giggs's bizarre miss and the huge deflection taken by Edu's free-kick soon after. He could have mused that bad things happen, and driven himself home while contemplating a good dinner.

That would have been behaviour more befitting a knight of the realm and British football's most successful manager. But Fergie cannot operate like that. Sweet reason comes hard – as hard as it did to Bill Shankly, when he growled that Ajax, who had just beaten Liverpool 5-0, were the most defensive team he had ever played. Sweet reason wouldn't drive United like the hounds of hell at the ankles of Saturday's conquerors in the run-in to what could well prove a superb Premiership race. But the rage of Ferguson well might.