Dave Kidd: Television bosses have brainwashed people into believing video technology is inevitable – but will we really be better off?

FIRST things first — news of the referees’ stag do in Marbella was a belting story.

Not least because we were all intrigued by what Anthony Taylor and his fellow whistlers might have got up to.

Because when a referee is the groom-to-be, there’d be no point tying him naked to a lamp post. Not when these men experience ritual public humiliation every weekend.

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I don’t honestly believe there is a link between the stag do and the disastrous displays of Taylor and Kevin Friend on Saturday — even though, in this job, I’m supposed to join in with the mock outrage and pretend I do.

The refs probably weren’t hungover. Taylor simply had a shocker in awarding Burnley a penalty for a handball by a Burnley player, after Friend had suffered a prolonged nightmare at Manchester United versus Bournemouth.

Yet this didn’t stop The Telly from using it as another excuse to advocate technology in decision-making.

After highlighting Taylor and Friend’s clangers on Sky’s Monday Night Football, host David Jones asked: “Surely it can’t come soon enough now?”

But The Telly wants technology in decision-making because The Telly doesn’t want to observe football, it wants to be central to football.

The Telly will tell you we must have technology because there are dozens of different cameras at every match.

And The Telly will tell you we must have technology because Premier League football is now worth so many billions in TV revenue.

So The Telly is actually telling you we must have technology because of The Telly.

Then The Telly pays ex-footballers, managers and journalists to go on The Telly, where they agree with each other about how obvious this all is.

Yet if you actually speak to senior refereeing figures involved in the trials for a ‘video assistant referee system’ they will tell you it is proving a logistical nightmare to implement in such a free-flowing sport.

And they will tell you they are nowhere near to agreeing a workable system.

This is despite a bold announcement that the FA Cup will be used as a guinea pig for such chaos next season.  Because the best way to revive interest in a wonderful competition, downgraded by bosses chasing Premier League TV money, is to turn it into a freak show. Obviously.

The Telly will tell you technology works in cricket and rugby. Which depends what you mean by ‘works’.

If the outcome of a Test match being decided by which captain is the better umpire, rather than which team is better at cricket, then it often ‘works’.

And if delays of six or seven minutes to judge the legitimacy of a try — without anyone being any the wiser — then it ‘works’ in rugby, too.

Some in cricket and rugby would rather scrap the Decision Review System and the Television Match Official. You just won’t hear them on The Telly.

Technology doesn’t stop arguments, it causes different arguments. And referees lose confidence, err on the side of caution and review everything.

No one has a problem with line calls — goal-line technology works perfectly, as does Hawk-Eye in tennis and run-outs or stumpings in cricket. But beyond that is a minefield.

It was interesting to hear the thinking footballer Frank Lampard pointing out on Sky that for many incidents, technology will be useless.

Taylor’s handball decision at Swansea might have been prevented by a video ref, but one major difficulty is where to draw the line on when and where you use such a system.