Post by Rags on Jul 4, 2010 12:29:14 GMT
Jul 3, 2010 22:16:32 GMT @chrish said:
Has it become common place in all sport that you have to be completely ruthless to succeed? You could certainly argue that some team's actions have bent the rules for the sport in general. I'm thinking here of Australia in Cricket and South Africa in rugby. Both teams have demonstrated over the years that they are willing to examine just how far they bend the laws of the game without actually taking a blind bit of notice of it. Who doesn't remember Ricky Ponting arguing with Duncan Fletcher at Trent Bridge after he was caught by a very able substitute fielder?* The allegation Ponting made was that England deliberately picked excellent local county fielders as subs and used them more than the spirit of the game should really allow them to. Technically Fletcher was breaking no rules, but it was against the spirit of the allowance of a substitute fielder when needed.It's interesting that you mention cricket here, Chris. I'm old enough to remember when even Test players walked when they were out. These days a player who knows he is out will stay in his crease until the umpire gives him out. The rewards are so high now that not to take any chance of staying in and winning a game is costly in many senses of the word.
I am also reminded that Sky Sports coverage has proved that when a catch has been taken, television can clearly show the ball to be touching the ground when it is actually not, and to be clearly in the hand when it is touching the ground.
Lampard's goal was far enough over the line to be certain, but what if it had bounced so that the centre of the ball was only 12 centimetres over the goal-line. That is 1 centimetre more than the average radius of the ball. The whole of the ball has crossed the line but that is where difficulties arise in trying to prove it.
Given that slo-mo footage now proves that a spherical object will flatten as it hits the ground (actually, any object flattens slightly as it hits a hard object), a ball that just crosses the line would be impossible for any human to prove using video technology as the circumference would squash so that the width of the ball increases and the height of the ball decreases: so that there would always be some part of the ball behind a post/over the line and therefore would not be proved to have completely crossed the line. Also, given that 2-dimensional camera footage deceives the eye (cf cricket), how can we be sure that the correct decision can be given by a human watching a television screen?
The answer is that it can't. Only when the ball has crossed the line by about 5 cms can the human eye know that it has completely crossed the line.
I still think that a slope inside the net behind the line is the only way of proving that the ball has crossed the line entirely, a point that appears to have been missed on here.
*Who doesn't remember the amazing catch by Strauss in the slips of that Test Match. He appeared to lead with one hand then changed to the other hand as if his brain realised he wouldn't catch it in mid-flight!