hahaha... masree saaa... king of Sarcasm, Giles Smith For a very long time now this column has been interested in discovering what those additional UEFA goal-line officials actually do of an evening. I suppose, in a way, it’s become a bit of an obsession – a life’s work, you could almost say. But it’s just a feeling we have that, if we ever did find out what officials number five and six are up to out there, standing quite near the goals on these European evenings, and if we wrote those findings up in words right here, it would give us the satisfaction of feeling that this column had made a contribution, however modest, to the sum of human knowledge. Because nobody else seems to know what those people are for either. This is clearly a new frontier for scientific understanding and whoever gets there first is going to be acclaimed for all time as a pioneer and ground-breaker – the person who first cracked the code and explained to the world the point of the goalline official. Unfortunately, despite having devoted many hours of close scrutiny to those extra assistants, and having thought extremely hard about their potential function at every moment available, the most plausible explanation we have been able to find for them up to now is: ‘somewhere to hang your coat.’ Which isn’t bad, at this stage of the investigation as early conclusions go. It may well be part of the truth. But my instincts as an experimental scientist tell me it’s not the whole truth, which is what we’re really after. You’ll understand how excited we became last night, then, during the second half, when – in a development which we believe was unprecedented, certainly in our own experience – the goalline official at the Shed End actively summoned the referee over to him in order to have some kind of consultation. This was rare: you very rarely see those extra people make a meaningful move or communicate with anyone else connected with the match in any way at all. This has led in some quarters to the theory that the goalline officials are, in fact, cyborgs, sent from another planet. (For the record, we don’t entirely dismiss this theory. But we’d need to see quite a lot more proof before we completely signed up to it.) Yet, just before Sporting could take the corner kick which had been awarded to them, the extra assistant distinctly appeared to call the referee to him, causing the game to be held up while the two of them put their heads together on the goalline and clearly had some kind of conversation. At that point, those of us watching seemed potentially to be on the verge of an important breakthrough – witnessing some sort of decisive intervention on the goalline official’s part which might explain their purpose more generally and why UEFA goes to the trouble of flying them all the way from Norway (in last night’s case), putting them in a hotel, feeding them, issuing them with uniforms, etc. Alas, what happened next was… well, nothing. The conversation went on for quite a long time. The players stood and waited. At the end of the conversation, the referee trotted back to his position on the edge of the penalty area. He then waved for the delayed corner to be taken. He didn’t talk to anyone; he didn’t noticeably address anything that the goalline official might have drawn to his attention. It was if the exchange had never happened. No wiser, then. No closer to solving the mystery. Still entirely in the dark, in fact. For all we know (and for all the difference it made), the goalline official called the referee over because he had just remembered the punchline to a joke that he had started to tell in the courtesy car on the way to the ground. But that’s not to say that we’re giving up now. Far from it. We scientists don’t do that. We know the truth may be hard to arrive at. But we push on towards it anyway.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 15:00:12 +0000
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