By Andrew Warshaw
June 7 – The Netherlands has become the latest top-flight country to embrace goalline technology despite UEFA President Michel Platini’s insistence that it will never be used in UEFA competitions.
The Dutch football association (KNVB) has decided to run trials of the Hawk-Eye camera-based system over the next two seasons, though not across the board as the English Premier League is doing.
Hawk-Eye, which uses seven cameras to decide whether the ball has crossed the line, will be used for the final rounds of Dutch cup competitions and crucial relegation and promotion fixtures.
The pilot project, entitled ‘Arbitration 2.0’, will be assigned a budget of €500,000 Euros and will also see the use of additional assistant referees – the system favoured Platini.
FIFA is using the German company GoalControl, the last to enter the market, for the forthcoming Confederations Cup but the Dutch, like the Premier League, have opted for Hawk-Eye due to its accuracy and its proven application in other sports.
Bert van Oostveen, director of professional football at the KNVB, said the system was being introduced in a limited number of fixtures to test how effective it was.
“It’s relatively expensive, so we need to spend the money wisely and know that it works,” he said. “The KNVB is known to explicitly support the introduction of technological tools. We therefore went straight to work with the introduction of goal-line monitoring and have presented it to the clubs who were overwhelmingly enthusiastic.”
The Dutch are also looking at the possibility of introducing video referees, a system used in sports such as rugby but a move that seems likely to re-inforce Platini’s concern that goalline technology will lead to other innovations that hold the game up and remove its spontaneity.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734829814labto1734829814ofdlr1734829814owedi1734829814sni@w1734829814ahsra1734829814w.wer1734829814dna1734829814