Les Jammy Bastards

I went to sleep last night dreaming about how much I hated Thierry Henry. I was resolved that in spite of the fact the referee should have seen it, if you do something like that in a game, even by mistake, you should own up. One of my favourite moments in football was watching Paolo Di Canio pick the ball up because the opposition keeper had got himself injured - I started to believe that this was the only way to play the game.

Then I realised, we all touch things instincitvely without meaning to. I won't go into specifics, but if you give it a minute's thought you will surely agree. And getting away with it brings a special kind of euphoria, no?

So Henry is off the hook for me, now that I've calmed down. What is leaving the worst taste is the fact that, secretly, Fifa will be loving every second of this. Since their disgraceful decision to seed the play-offs, their agenda has been clear; make sure the big teams get to the world cup so we can sell more shirts to the Africans. With Ireland up in arms (and let's be honest, few other countries can put on a strop quite as well), Blatter, Platini et al can lap up the headlines they're getting, then with the world's media on them, say that football is a funny old game and that is why we love it, and that maybe France would have won on penalties anyway. The fact that Ireland should never have been forced into a nearly impossible play-off will not be raised, nor apologised for. My only comfort is that Domenech, the man who believes Sidney Govou is more of a potent striker than Karim Benzema, will still be at the helm in July. They won't make it out of the group.

With regards to goalline technology, I may be the only person in the world sitting slightly on the fence. Maybe there is some beauty in the human error in football. Not when you're on the recieving end of course, but any fan can think of an example when a dodgy goal has been given to their team and they're loved it all the more to see the look on the keeper's face. In reality, missing a handball like Henry's is one in a million, and even a computer could stuff it up that often. A goalline official would have spotted the offence in a second, but when these people appeared in the Europa league, they had the piss ripped out of them.

My worry is that one technology leads to another, and the next time I'm screaming at the ref he can turn to me and say, 'It's not me mate, it's the machine.'

If the roles had been reversed last night, I'd have laughed myself to sleep. When Carlton Cole handles on the line on the last day of our season when we need a point to stay up, I don't want to see goalline technology anywhere within a hundred miles. My only enduring emotion is sadness, that the team who suffered this incredibly rare injustice happened to be one of the sides Fifa deemed unworthy of qualifying for the world cup in the first place.