Why Football Needs Replay Now and How It Could Be Used

The year of 2009 has been a year of greatness on the football pitch, but there has been many problems that have arisen within the last six months that have made the call for video replay for the beautiful game.

In the second leg of the Champions League semifinal between Chelsea and FC Barcelona at Stamford Bridge, referee Tom Øverbø denied Chelsea five potential penalties, creating buzz throughout the football world if replay should be instituted.

Then in the FIFA Confederations Cup in June, American Jozy Altidore shot got stopped by Egyptian defender Hani Said on the goal line by his hand but referee Michael Hester ruled that the ball didn't strike his arm, which nearly cost the United States a chance to go onto the semifinals.

And more recently, dives by Eduardo in a Champions League qualifier against Celtic and with controversial penalties given to dives such as Liverpool's David N'gog against Birmingham City, more and more people have been calling for replay.

However, we have now seen a country get denied of going to the World Cup due to handball inside of the box, as France's Thierry Henry committed a handball inside of the penalty box during extra time before making a cross to William Gallas, who was able to score on a header against an Ireland team that was appealing to referee Martin Hannson over the Henry handball.

Gallas' goal gave France a 1-1 draw with Ireland, but advanced onto the World Cup on aggregate over an Irish squad that played their hearts out for 120 minutes, and deserved to go onto the World Cup.

But now more than ever, the need for replay has risen to such a point that it must be implemented as soon as possible.

The last thing that football needs is for an incident such as the Henry incident to happen during next year's World Cup, as a team such as an Ireland could be denied of advancement in the World Cup or potentially a World Cup title due to the fact that there is no video replay.

Despite the fact that football has been a game that has been reluctant to implement replay, they now have no choice as countries such as Ireland and teams such as Chelsea have been denied a chance to advance onto a major stage due to a terrible referee decision and the decision could be fixed by video replay.

Even sports such as baseball and tennis, two sports that have had long histories in which replay was never in existence, have switched to replay and the replay system has gotten great reviews that have overturned wrong decisions by umpires.

Neither of these sports have been taken over by replay, and if football implemented replay, we wouldn't have problems within the goal area.

There would be no human error on making the right decision based of off replay, and there would be no more incidents such as Michael Ballack running after Øverbø and screaming at him after his appeal for a penalty got denied at the end of the Chelsea Barcelona game.

And with the complain that it would take more time for replay, a certain amount of stoppage time could be added on for each review of something inside of the penalty box and a camera could be on the inside of the crossbar, which would give a referee an eagle-eyed view of what just happened and would make the call a lot easier.

Mangers such as Arsene Wegner, Rafa Benitez and Guus Hiddick have all campaigned for replay in football, and quite frankly they are right as they want the right call to be made in the beautiful game.

And despite all of what FIFA has said about ruining the flow of the game, I think that the time has come for football to move into the 21st century and implement video replay inside of the penalty area.