Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you.....drumroll.....Joynt's Voluntary Tackle, The Sequel.

It missed, the ref said so

I suppose we need to know where the camera that picks up the "Fantastic" was relative to the posts. But, it seems that the picture confirms was was bleeding obvious at the time - it clearly went in and by some way.

Given what we have available I would say the best method would be to get the behind the posts view and the side on view (I assume there would be one). Run the two pieces of footage simultaneously and stop it at the point when the ball reaches the goal line on the side on clip. Then you should be able to tell from behind the posts whether it was online or not.

Surely you aren't suggesting that the ball suddenly deviated from that line before it reached the post?

Hudds had spent the entire game messing round at the play the ball, so with a few minutes left and down to 12 men, when Bentham saw the ball come out it was probably fair to assume that a Hudds player had his hands on it.

Maybe a mistake, but in the context of Huddersfields tactics upto that point they can hardly complain.

Correct. Bentham was the only person who was ideally placed to see where it went.

All this debate about camera angles and trajectories is irrelevant if Bentham was stood directly underneath it and saw it pass outside the post.

Assume ? Is that how they're refereeing games now ? Thought they could only give what they SEE.

Even Bentham can only say what impression he had in the fleeting instant it was happening, that is all he has to go on. Sadly the evidence at least extremely strongly suggests, if I can put it at its mildest, that he was wrong.

Your statement is based on the quaint idea that Bentham is incapable of making a mistake. I am sure he himself would not claim that. Your statement presupposes that in 80 minutes, and a few thousand incidents, every single thing the ref decides is factually correct. With respect, do you need me to explain to you why that is a silly view?

All we know is Bentham THOUGHT it had missed, and sadly we don't have any way of replaying what he saw. But of course he DID have the option of using the video replay system and I must say I don't understand why on such a hotly disputed call he chose not to use it, what would have been the detriment?

I'm still uncertain.

The first set of pictures from FA does show it drifting to the left slightly and is not conclusive. On the other hand, the striking of that sign seems to make it nailed on.

On the other hand, the one sent in by Fully, with the posts drawn straight up, does seem to suggest that it drifted towards the posts.

I'm still no more certain, other than Bentham was in a very good position to judge, looking up.

Ball comes out in a tackle. The ref hasn't seen a knock on or it stolen, what does the ref do?
He has to take a guess at what happened. If he saw a defenders hands around the ball and an arm suddenly move back in a quick motion then he'd probably give a penalty. If he didn't see that he'll probably give a knock on. But it's still a guess, and it's ALWAYS going to happen. RL is unlike football or union where the ref can just wave play on if he hasn't seen anything. We have regular situations where a decision HAS to be made one way or another regardless of how good a view the ref had.

But it is. You can clearly see this, as the far posts in the image are bang in the middle of the near posts. the camera is set up precisely level with the centre spot.


No, you wouldn't. Unless the cameraman is completely in line with the ball's path. From the image I posted showing the ball as it approached the camera, you can see that he was almost exactly in line, but not quit, because it endes up a (short) distance to his right.

This means that the closer the ball gets to him, it will have an apparent motion from left to right (from his point of view) which will at first be almost unnoticeable until, if it gets level with him, it is exactly 90 degrees to his right. As I said before, if you drew a path of the ball as seen by the cameraman, it would for that reason be a narrow parabolic path. It would not be a straight up and down vertical path.


It's not your forte, but you're over-complicating it. What happens is that the ball goes up but at an ever decreasing rate, until eventually gravity wins and the ball starts to fall back to ground at an ever decreasing rate. Viewed from above, the ball would set off fast, and then decelerate at an even rate as it lost forward speed due to air resistance.

Viewed from the side, the combination of these effects is broadly like the image below. That is for a golf ball, and is not the same as for a rugby ball, because a golf ball generates lift and so continues to rise for longer, but in general terms it is the same sort of path. Similar is true for a bullet, a cricket ball or any unpowered ballistic object.




But it is harder to disprove the laws of physics, and if we know where the ball started off, and where it ended up, we can draw virtual lines, can't we. The question is not whether we can prove at what point in any image the ball passed the goal line, indeed that would still not tell us much if anything. The question is whether we can work out whether the ball's trajectory was inside or outside the posts. We can, and I did.