Soccer Top (Not Tennessee), 11 December 2007

This was going to be a Stove Top, but I found enough football/soccer content to have a post that's a little more focused.

Check what Soccerlens had to say about the Mourinho-AC Milan possibilities.

And speaking of soccer, check out Michael Hanscom's "Expressiveness."

But this practice may be extensible to other sports:

For this year’s FIFA Club World Cup, which is currently taking place in Japan, FIFA is testing out new ball-chip technology that lets referees know whether or not the ball crossed the goal line in a scoring situation.

Can you imagine what would happen if technology were able to state the exact location of a soccer ball, or a football, or a baseball, or a hockey puck? Let's just deal with the ramifications for soccer:

[T]his chip-ball technology is something that football does need in order to minimize the amount of controversy over a particular call. Referees are far from perfect, and despite having multiple officials on the pitch, there are some split-second occurrences that can elude the human eye for a fan watching on television, for the people in the stands, and even for the officials, who have the most up-close and personal view in the house.

And it turns out that I was ignorant of one similar use in another sport:

Similar technology is in use in other sports, most notably tennis, where Cyclops technology has been used for the last three decades to show if a serve is in or out, and recently, the Hawk-eye system, which was initially used for television broadcast replays, has been progressively used in major tennis tournaments, allowing for clarification of close calls, and giving players the ability to challenge whether the ball was in or out. Aside from being used in tennis, it has also been used in cricket and snooker broadcasts, but as of now, tennis is the only sport to actually use the technology for live action purposes.

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