Why Mr Blatter Is Right This Time

That call ruined a wonderful game. The second half and a possible extra time could have been equally spectacular as the first half. The match could have become a classic for its beauty, not a wrong call. A true football fan should be more faschinated by the game itself rather than debates afterwards. It's pathtic the president of the world's No. 1 sport thinks that the sport has to rely on referee errors to maintain its appeal.

Hi Intigen, thanks for your reply. I don't think the call ruined the game. It is, and always has been, part of this game to overcome a bad call, and show that you are able to win the game despite being set back. In the end, I think this time, however unfortunate, the German team showed in the second half, with near surgical precision, that they were the better team yesterday. I don't think that with a 2-2 score that would have been very much different. Just like Argentina showed later in the evening that even though they were given the first goal, in the end they would have won anyway.
You are right though, that the game itself is more important than the debates afterwards, but to me the beauty lies in the skill, or lack of it, of the 25 men on the field. Not in technological tools. I think the, bad, decision of not counting the Lampard goal brought extra fire to this game.

PS: I removed your second comment, since it was identical. Please let me know if you want that differently.

If you don't want to see technological tools used, then you must be dissapointed. The referees are already using technology to communicate with each other, and they are using technology (watches, clocks) to time the match. You may as well argue that the referee should throw his watch away and the beauty of the game lies in his skill, or lack of it, to estimate time.

The whole sport is being ruined by this crap, because players have learned how to use this weakness and manipulate referees. Now we can see dives and fake injures in almost every match, because they know if they can trick the referee, they get away with it. This is not the "pure" football Mr. Blatter was talking about.

PS: I double-posted by mistake, thanks for removing the other one.

LOL, I am not fanatically opposed to technology. Watches and clocks are not a problem. The headsets used now are not an improvement, I think. But so be it. Even a blinking light, like used in ice hockey to indicate whether the ball passed the line I can maybe accept. But stopping the game, sometimes in mid-play to review video footage of a certain moment would in my book ruin the game forever. When and where would you stop the play? And where would you resume? This would be shifting the problem of a bad decision to the moment of interrupting the game.

And as for influencing with dives, Dutch star player Robben used to have the reputation of a diver. In the last European Championships that was very clear. Each foul committed against him was seen by the refs as a dive. I think he learned from that, because I don't see him doing it that much anymore. And then again, both diving and stalling for time are part of the game, for which the referee can take out his yellow card. For me, the game also consists of these elements of psychological game play.

There are plenty of ways to assist referees without interrupting the game, and if you watched ARG v MEX yesterday, you would know protests against wrong decisions interrupt the game much more severely than trying to get the call right. It's really funny that the whole world knows what happened while the referees are still talking to each other without a clue. They are idiots in everyone's eyes yet Mr. Blatter says this way their "authority" is maintained.