There have been a few recent examples in football of poor decisions costing teams dearly. West Ham had every right to feel aggrieved after a late equaliser was chalked off against Chelsea, and although the mayhem at the end of the Juventus-Salernitana game was very entertaining, you can understand why the home team felt they were robbed of a dramatic victory.
These are cases of football officials, despite the video technology at their disposal, getting things so wrong that it makes you wonder if they are in the appropriate profession. But sometimes even the technology can fail, as Huddersfield found to their cost with the recent Hawk-Eye glitch. Maybe we just have to accept that both humans and machines are fallible.
Prior to Hawk-Eye, we were solely reliant on the eyes of the officials to help us determine whether the ball had crossed the line, and as Frank Lampard and Pedro Mendes can confirm, that system was flawed, even if it was obvious to most that decent goals had been ruled out. Another such incident occurred way back in September 1980. Step forward Clive Allen.
Allen had already endured an unusual summer. The most expensive teenager in the sport, the QPR striker had signed for Arsenal before mysteriously moving on to Crystal Palace just 62 days later, without playing a competitive game for the Gunners. Allen did score four goals for his latest club before Palace's trip to Highfield Road on September 6. But the 'Team of the 80s' was struggling.
Three defeats in their opening four league matches suggested that this would be a long season for Terry Venables and his Palace team. Although four players had been called into England's U21 team to play Norway - Terry Fenwick, Billy Gilbert, Vince Hilaire, and Allen - there were worrying signs that there was trouble ahead.
After an uneventful first half at a sparsely populated Highfield Road, the match sprung into life during ten minutes of chaos. Allen gave the visitors the lead in the 47th minute, only for defensive lapses allowing Gerry Daly to score twice in the space of five minutes. But it would be a moment in the 55th minute that would dominate the post-match analysis.
Awarded a free-kick roughly 20 yards out, Palace were looking to hit back immediately from Daly's double. As the ball was rolled to him, Allen struck an arrow of a shot towards the top corner of Jim Blyth's goal, the keeper helpless as he flung himself to his left. The ball slammed into the stanchion and rebounded out, Palace's players initially celebrating their leveller.
But it soon became apparent that something was about to kick off, and sadly for Palace it was not the opposition from the centre spot. Referee Derek Webb, from Sale in Cheshire, had not awarded the goal, and as five Palace players surrounded him, the official was now under pressure to sort out the mess.
Luckily the moment of controversy was covered on BBC's Match of the Day, shown the day after the fixture. "And here's an incident," an excited commentator John Motson noted, as the first replay was shown. "Clive Allen hammered that and it came back off the woodwork. Palace say it was over the line and the referee is going to have to consult the linesman."
It's interesting that Motson stated the ball had hit the woodwork. Maybe he actually thought this was the case, yet it soon became apparent to the television viewer that the ball had indeed crossed the line, thumping into the stanchion before coming back into play.
As Webb waved away protests from the Palace players to discuss the incident with his linesman, Allen could quite clearly be seen mouthing that the ball had hit the stanchion. Yet the only men that mattered did not agree. "And the referee says no goal," Motson said, after the officials had deliberated for ten seconds.
Understandably, Venables and his players were furious and their collective mood was hardly helped when Andy Blair put the game out of Palace's reach with the final goal in the 73rd minute. Inevitably that was not the end of the story. Allen, Venables, and many others joined the debate as to whether technology was needed in football.
"I watched it all the way, it was one of those shots you know is going in from the moment it leaves your boot," Allen revealed. "I was flabbergasted." The Daily Express' John Davies had sympathy. "Clive Allen was robbed of what might have been BBC's Goal of the Month by what was certainly the Boob of the season."
"Palace thought it was a goal," Jim Hooley added in the Daily Mail. "Coventry thought it was a goal and thousands of spectators thought it was a goal, but Mr Webb thought it had hit the bar." Webb sheepishly responded the next day. "No doubt I'll hear more about it. It was a split-second decision I had to make, and I must stand by it."
Venables did not hold back in his post-match interviews. "It was a disgusting decision. I've never seen anything like it. Clive is choked and he is entitled to be. That goal would have brought us back to 2-2 with a fighting chance of taking a point. It was a goal. End of story. We lost the game after that. It knocked us for six."
Speaking on Match of the Day, Jimmy Hill argued the case for video technology to be used. Venables was not so sure, although he did suggest goal-line technology could be investigated. "I don't believe we should bring video recordings into football. But something like Wimbledon's magic eye would settle any football arguments like the one at Coventry. It could set along the goal-line."
A machine named Cyclops had been introduced at Wimbledon to aid line calls on serves, yet in 1980 the chances of developing a system that could be used for goal-line decisions seemed remote. When you consider it took until the 2010s for goal-line technology to be approved then it shows how this was not really a possibility in the 1980s.
Things would not get any better for Palace. Venables left for QPR a month later, and three more managers would be used in a season that saw them finish bottom of Division One. Allen would reunite with Venables in the summer of 1981, and it would take until the end of the decade for Palace to get back to the top flight.
That Allen goal did feature on Fantasy Football's Phoenix From The Flames section, with Baddiel and Skinner memorably mocking Hill's pronunciation of the word stanchion (staunchion). Yet Hill did speak a lot of sense at the time.
"But one mustn't forget that a referee can't call on a video recording. He has to make a decision on what he thinks he saw," Hill said. Just as well we now have video technology to help on some big calls in this modern era. What could possibly go wrong?
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