Instant replay, please!

It is the hand that is talked about world-wide; it is the hand that receives the most coverage since Diego Maradona’s infamous “hand of god.” Yes, Thierry Henry’s handball that directly put France into the World Cup tournament in South Africa is what I want to talk about today, and I have only one take on this topic: introduce instant replay to soccer, and any other sport where a poor judgment call can be so costly.

For those of you who do not follow soccer/football, here’s what happened: in a winner-take-all match between the Republic of Ireland and France, where the winner is qualified to be one of the 32 teams to compete for the World Cup, and the loser is sent home, French star Thierry Henry went off-side and used his hand to move the ball to his right feet, allowing him to pass the ball to teammate William Gallas, who scored the winning goal in extra time. The result? France is going to the World Cup; Ireland is going home.

Back to the issue of instant replay. The “strongest” opposing takes against instant replay fall into one of two sorry categories: one, it will slow the flow of the game down; two, it is against the tradition/culture of the game. Both arguments cannot be more unacceptable, and here's why:

Soccer/Football is already a "slow" sport to begin with, in the sense that it contains a lot of plotting and build-up before the rare goals. In moments where a major dispute occurs, pausing the game for two minutes to make the right call is not any more "wasteful" than watching a player act as if he was shot by bullets, rolling all over the pitch until the referee pulls out a yellow card against another player whose leg did not even touch that rolling player. Is soccer/football fans can bear watching that nonsense happening frequently on the pitch, then waiting two minutes for the referees to make the right call certainly would not be unbearable.

As for the "traditions" of the game. Traditionally, surgeons don't use any anti-septic to clean their surgical instruments, and there were no anesthetics to put one out, does that mean that such old practice should remain in the medical field? Even bringing the talk back to the soccer/football pitch, they did not have the sleek shoes, the aero-dynamic shirts back in the day, so why are companies spending big bucks trying to develop gear that would improve performance by a fraction of a percent?

Fact is, the technology is here, and it can make the game's results that much more convincing. If FIFA truly cares about the development of this "world's sport," it should introduce instant replay before the World Cup. Allow each time to have a maximum number of challenges similar to tennis and American football, but the right call needs to be made, no matter what the sport is, and that's the bottom line.