LONDON: England’s last warm-up before flying off to Euro 2012 was also a test for goal-line technology at Wembley but the Hawk-Eye system was not put under strain as Roy Hodgson’s men beat Belgium.
At Wembley the goals were fitted with the necessary calibration equipment, inserted into three holes on the lower outer edges of each goalpost. Together with data picked up by a battery of cameras around the stadium, these allow Hawk-Eye operators to see whether or not the ball crossed the line in any given incident. No information from the test was passed to the referee Peter Rasmussen during the game.
The information was used only for private assessment of how Hawk-Eye’s football application is shaping up. England manager Roy Hodgson gave the test his seal of approval in the run-up to the game, saying: “It is another advance technologically and one which I hope will prove successful and will at least banish some of the ghosts of the past.
“I don’t think there are too many people in football who have too many objections to goal-line technology because there is nothing worse than losing a game because a goal you scored has been disallowed when everybody can see afterwards that it was a goal.”
The International Football Association Board, in charge of the game’s rules globally, will decide in Zurich on July 5 whether or not to allow the use of Hawk-Eye and/or GoalRef, a Danish-German project which works through sensors placed within the ball and under the goal area.
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