technology in the football
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The introduction of goal line technology to professional football has so far been a great success, and an encouraging sign of things to come in the modern game. The systems were given the green light to be introduced into football late last year to give clear and quick decisions on goal line incidents and finally put an end to a controversy that has been part of the game for many years. The Premier League was the first domestic league to embrace the new technology, and leading company Hawk-Eye Innovations have installed a system in each of the 20 Premier League grounds as well as Wembley. This is a significant step in the game because it gives the ref and players 100% confidence when something happens in the game they both know the technology has made the right decision. The Hawk-Eye system uses high frame rate cameras directed at each goal to detect where the ball is positioned relative to the goal line, and simply sends a signal to a watch worn by the match official to confirm whether the ball has crossed the line with accuracy of millimetres (Hawk Eye, 2015). This signal comes within a second of the incident occurring, ensuring minimal time is wasted and the match can continue. Definitive replays are also employed to prove the accuracy of the technology to the viewing audience. With all this technology coming into the game it makes it much easier for the ref, before when they did not have the goal line technology they would have to make the decision on what they saw and what they thought was the right call, sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong. That has gone altogether now and games finish with the right decision which no one can question. According to Sky Sports, (2013) When talking to Kevin Davies about Goal Line Technology ''I've been on the receiving end of a decision that would have been different had goal-line technology been available. When I was at Chesterfield we were in the semi-finals of the FA Cup back in 1997 against Middlesbrough and Jonathan Howard scored a goal which was way over the line. The linesman sort of flagged to give the goal but there was a major mix-up with the referee David Elleray. That was a semi-final of an FA Cup, it doesn't get much bigger than that for Chesterfield - we were in League Two at the time and if that hadn't have happened we'd have been 3-1 up with about 10 minutes to go and could have made it to the final''. This statment just shows how important goal line technology could have been if it was available 15 years before.
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