Did the officials cost the Hokies a critical ACC win?
Page S2From§Eachthe noon edition — 3 October 2026
Virginia Tech loses on the naked eye; UEFA rejected the goal-line camera as "Playstation football" in 2010
Hot Mic Moment
Put me on the political desk, because this is the same racket. Replay is only one thing: letting somebody who isn't the crew look at the tape. That is an institution ruling on its own kick.
Gushis side
This reporter has run the videotape back eleven times, and this reporter will tell you what the press box in Blacksburg already knows: the ball went up, the arms stayed down, and Virginia Tech went home a loser to Pittsburgh in a ballgame of enormous conference consequence.
GUS: The remedy is not complicated, and it does not require a laboratory. Station a man beside the post. A human being, a whistle, a pair of eyes. The gals in the press box will find such a solution insufficiently modern, and this reporter will gently assure them it has served sport since antiquity.
GUS: Now, Platini was a marvelous player. But it was Blatter, as this reporter recalls, who warned that the camera would reduce the sport to "Playstation football" — 2014 or thereabouts, following the tournament in Brazil.
GUS: And the extra set of eyes worked handsomely. Donetsk, the European Championship: Rooney hooking the ball off the line, Terry's header carrying England through, and the fifth official standing right there, seeing the whole of it clean.
Trudyher side
Eleven times and you still don't know, which is the story. CBS Sports put the question in its own headline this morning — "Was it actually good?" — over a critical ACC game. The only record of that kick is the recollection of the men who ruled on it. Hold that thought while he builds to his big idea.
The gals in that press box file on the same deadline you do, sugar, and any one of them would have told you your big idea is sixteen years old and already has a father. Michel Platini proposed exactly that — a goal-line referee's assistant instead of goal-line technology — BBC Sport, 25 October 2010.
Platini said it. UEFA president, 25 October 2010, BBC Sport, and he said it with the disputed calls of that summer's World Cup still warm on the table. You had the man and the quote in the same breath and handed the quote to another fella. Lie down a minute.
Backwards and blind. 19 June 2012, Donbass Arena: Dević shot, John Terry hooked it away from behind the goal line, Rooney's header put England through. The fifth official was standing beside that goal and did not give it. That is the entire argument, Gus — the man beside the post was tried on co-hosts' home soil, and the man beside the post missed it. They sell lion's mane in capsules now.
Gus, the mic is live and you have just compared a field-goal crew to the executive branch, which is unkind to the field-goal crew. It is also the record: 18 to 19 September 2026, the ban announced, the passes confiscated the next day; Judge Timothy Kelly ordered them restored immediately on 24 September, and that same day CNN and MS NOW reporters were still kept out of the Xi Jinping state-dinner arrival while other networks walked in — the Committee to Protect Journalists called it censorship.
“A camera that settles whether a ball crossed a line has existed for most of my adult life, and the people who run these sports keep deciding they'd rather not know. That's not nostalgia for the human element, that's a preference for an unreviewable call, and the officials who make it are the only ones who ever have to live with it. A kid's scholarship season turns on a kick nobody can play back.”
“Look — the human element is what people love about the game, and if you put a camera on every post you've got Playstation football, which is not my phrase, I'm quoting. Did I say we don't want it reviewed? That doesn't sound like me. We're always open to reviewing things; we just happen to think the officials on the field, who were there, are better positioned than a machine that was also there.”
The receipts
· The debate surrounding goal-line technology resurfaces as co-hosts Ukraine are denied an apparent goal in controversial circumstances against England, with John Terry hooking the ball from behind the from the morgue, 19 Jun 2012
· UEFA President Michel Platini proposes a goal-line referee's assistant rather than goal-line technology which he says would lead to "Playstation Football", despite controversial decisions in 2010 Worl from the morgue, 25 Oct 2010
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.