While technology and the use of footage have been introduced in several sport disciplines to enable referees to take the right decisions and avoid controversy, football remains very much in the prehistoric times in this regard.

It has remained too conservative, too stuck to the past, and this has not helped the sport eliminate the many incidents that have unfortunately led to teams winning or losing games because of human error – when this error could have easily been avoided.

In tennis, players get at least three chances in any set to challenge calls by line-judges or umpires. In rugby, footage is used to determine certain situations to help the referee make the right decision. In fencing, judges can be challenged too. And there are other sport disciplines that have gone down this road or are planning to do so.

In football, we have been hearing about the need to introduce video evidence during the course of a match for several years, but nothing has come out of it. Footage is used by disciplinary commissioners to determine violent behaviour which officials might have missed, but that’s all about it.

FIFA has agreed to increase the number of officials – although this is not happening in every competition – in a bid to try to limit the cases when referees make the wrong decisions. But it has not accepted to introduce any other method to offer the officials a better chance to commit fewer mistakes.

It was only last week that, in Italy, Napoli were awarded a penalty against Inter which would have been a simple free-kick from outside the penalty area if the referee had any possibility of watching the replay. It was not the first such instance, and it will neither be the last.

And this week we had another “delay” – it has been announced that goal-line technology will not be introduced as from 2012, but it will take at least until the following year. The English Premier League had been planning this option, but it has now decided to postpone its inclusion for at least another season.

England won the 1966 World Cup thanks to a goal that was allowed although the ball never crossed the line, but they were at the wrong end of a similar decision in 2010 when the ball this time did cross the line but the goal was not allowed. On both occasions, they were playing against Germany.

It seems that the testing of the goal-line technology system will be taking longer to perfect than originally planned. In the meantime, the possibility of matches being won and lost because of human error continues to exist.