Match Fixing

With news that a CL match in the last 3-4 years is under suspicion of match fixing in England, does it come as a surprise, considering some of the terrible refereeing we've seen in Europe?

A couple of games instantly spring to mind, the Chelsea v Barca game at Stamford Bridge where Drogba lost it at the end....
and our recent game where we had a goal disallowed for offside that wasn't, and the most blatant penalty where Mario was dragged halfway across the 6 yard box right in front of the ref and linesman?

With a single individual ( ref's) left with the final decision on such matters, there will always be a risk of match fixing, isn't it time the football world got it's shit together, and went down the way of Rugby and Cricket, so that a majority decision using video evidence can be made for :

a) Ball over the line
b) offside goals
c) penalty claims
d) Red card issues, serious foul play, dangerous tackles etc..

Games often stop while the ref either debates it with linesman, or is dealing with unhappy players surrounding him, so I don't see the issue of stopping the game to get a quick yes or no using video evidence. With added time seeming to creep up to a regular 4,5,6,7 mins and sometimes further for extreme cases any way, it's not as if it's going to make much difference. This will take the pressure off the ref for potentially game and season changing incidents, and as £millions of pounds is potentially at stake on a single decision, on incidents that happen in the blink of an eye, it seems very strange that we are still leaving it to someone who often has the worst view! In these days of ever increasing resolutions and clarity of picture, floating camera's etc, why the hell aren't we using it?
If we continue with the "traditional" method, there will always be individuals who can be got to, bought, coerced.

Blatter and Platini need to get their heads out of their arses, get football into the 21st Century, otherwise this will continue to be an issue, wherever there is big money, there will be people trying to exploit the system, Las Vegas employs vast amounts of technology to make sure their interests are protected, yet Football, the biggest sport in the world, is still wide open to potential corruption.......

I agree Beware although you can't stop the game for all the reasons you gave or we will never finish a match

Some people may think our 2 injury time goals to win the PL may have been a fix. I mean how could that possibly have happened ???

It would help if we knew what those extra officials were for on the goal line. In both incidents in our game versus Ajax, that guy was in clear sight of the incidents and in neither case did they flag anything.

In the interests of fairness, I've never seen them flag for anything in any European game I've watched, regardless of which teams were playing and which suffered at the hands of incompetence.

So... what do they do exactly??

There is always the risk that refs are falsely accused just because they have had a bad game. If cricketers/umpires can be paid many tens of thousands even when earning millions (the players anyway) what is stopping a lower earning player or a top ref (£100k per annum) from going down the slippery slope?

For instance, Howard Webb has had a couple of very poor games, no-one is accusing him of incorrectly affecting results of matches.

With gambling going hand in hand with football (and other sports), players are brought up with the idea that betting is good. Cricket has had many examples of players taking money from bookies so you'd expect that football, being a much bigger sport, has it's own dirty players.

It made me laugh when i read which CL game in England it involved. The Debrecen goalie was told to let more than 2 goals in, but because Liverpool couldn't hit a barn door, they only scored 1 .

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21335331

Those officials on the goal-line are a complete and utter waste of time, space and money.....they serve no purpose whatsoever......litterally.

As for technology, we all know it needs to be introduced sooner rather than later.....starting with goal-line cameras.