Lee Probert is the latest Referee to get a big decision wrong as he waved away penalty claims from Bolton players when John Terry clearly handled the ball inside the Chelsea Penalty area. Isn’t it about time for Video Technology in Football?

Chelsea ran out 1-0 winners on the night and that decision could have proved vital in the Premiership title race as a draw would have put Manchester United and Arsenal right back in it. Can we seriously keep on allowing such big decisions to be wrong just because this is football?

There have been plenty of other huge blunders in recent weeks like the failure of Howard Webb to award Aston Villa a stonewall penalty during the first half of their FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea. There was also the offside goal Drogba scored against United 10 days ago at Old Trafford, and who can forget the Thierry Henry juggling act to set up Gallas for the decisive goal for France against Ireland in the World Cup Qualification play-off.

And let’s not beat around the bush here, these were not marginal calls, they were quite blatant and certainly in the case of the Villa decision the Referee could not have been in a better place to make the right call.

So what’s going on? Our Refs are meant to be professional right? They’re the best we’ve got, and they can’t get the big decisions right. Is it the pressure of the big occasion? Do they opt not to make decisions as they know they’ll get less criticism for not awarding a legitimate penalty (because the team may not have scored it anyway) than awarding an illegitimate one?

Although the Premier League will now no doubt come out and say they’re putting processes in place to minimise these errors, like suspending the match officials in question, the reality is that Referees are only human and these sort of mistakes will always happen. The frequency of these errors is likely to increase as the men in the middle are put under more and more pressure, and eventually they’ll become too afraid to make the easiest of calls for fear of the abuse that managers, players, commentators and fans will throw at them.

So it’s clear that something needs to be done to eliminate these wrong decisions and minimise the pressure put on Referees. This can be done quite simply, in my opinion, by introducing some video technology combined with a challenges system. Teams would get two or three challenges per game when the Captain could call a time out and challenge a decision. The Ref would then stop play, point upstairs and wait for the footage to be reviewed by the Video Referee with a decision displayed on the big screen, like in cricket. There would obviously have to be a time limit of say 10 seconds to challenge a call, and a limited number of appeals per game, per team.

The main argument put forward against using video technology in this way is that it would potentially ruin the flow of the game, with matches always stop starting as teams challenge decisions. That’s why there would have to be a limit to the number of challenges allowed per team to say too, then there would be a maximum of four stoppages per game.

This limited number of challenges would also encourage Captains to save them until there was a really big decision going against their team, like a penalty claim or viewing to see if the ball crossed the line. This sort of incidence don’t happen every game so some matches may have no interruptions at all.

At the end of the day the players generally know if it’s a foul or not, or if the ball crossed the line or not, and they could just signal to their Captain to call time out if the decision has wrongly gone against them. It would give the Captains some responsibility at last.

The important positive implication of introducing Video Technology into Football is that it would take the pressure off the Referee allowing him to concentrate on making the calls as he sees them.

Titles are won and lost on these decisions, teams relegated or promoted, qualification to the World Cup sealed or taken away. They’re just too big to get wrong, and if this sort of system was introduced we could actually see the standard of refereeing improve as the man in the middle finally becomes liberated.

What are your thoughts? Could you see this sort of system working in the Premier League or do you think it would ruin the flow of the game, and give us nothing to talk about? Comments welcome below.