In the closing minutes of a recent Manchester United-Tottenham Hotspur game, with the score at 0-0,United goalkeeper Roy Carroll came up with a slapstick error that should have cost his team the game. Carroll made a terrible hash of a straightforward catch by allowing the ball to bounce out of his grasp. As it spun over his shoulder and bounced into the goal, Carroll dove desperately backward, finally getting a hand onto the ball – by this time it was already a good yard into the net – and scooping it back into play.

The game continued, and the scoreboard still read 0-0. No goal. Neither the referee nor his assistant on the sideline had seen the ball enter the net. That was bad enough, but it was made worse by the fact that neither official could be faulted. Both of them were yards behind the play, stranded up near the halfway line – exactly where they should have been when Tottenham’s Pedro Mendes launched his speculative 40-yard drop-shot.

Linesman Rob Lewis was still 25 yards short of the goal line when Carroll clawed the ball to safety. His wry comment – “There was nothing I could have done differently, apart from running faster than Linford Christie” – highlights the dilemma for soccer. Which is that, every so often, crucial decisions on goal-scoring have to be made by officials who did not get a clear view of the play.

Until Carroll’s epic performance, the most famous of these incidents occurred during overtime in the 1966 England-Germany World Cup final. With the score tied 2-2, a shot from England’s Geoff Hurst smashed into the underside of the crossbar, bounced down onto the goal line, and out of the goal. Or did it bounce inside the goal line?

The England players, convinced that the ball had crossed the line and then spun back into play, swarmed around the Swiss referee demanding a goal. The referee consulted his Azerbaijani linesman, who emphatically awarded the goal even though he had not been positioned on the goal line. England went on to win soccer’s greatest prize, but the Germans – and many others – have never been convinced that the ball crossed the line.

The primitive television coverage of 1966 could not provide a convincing replay, and no one has unearthed a photograph that shows where the ball landed. How different for poor Roy Carroll, whose blooper has been replayed thousands of times from numerous angles, with all the replays showing clearly that the ball was way over the goal line.

Millions of television viewers throughout the world knew that Mendes had scored a genuine goal, but the referee, the only man whose opinion mattered, did not – could not – know.

The phantom goal has launched a wave of demands that, in cases where the referee cannot determine whether the ball has entered the net or not, he should have access to instant replays. But FIFA President Sepp Blatter has made his view on this known on many occasions: There will be no use of technological aids as long as he is in office.

Blatter’s stance has something of the Luddite in it, but there are strong soccer reasons for supporting it. First, many fear that the use of replays, once begun, would be ever more widely used for all types of contentious decisions and would utterly destroy the non-stop flow of the game. Second, there is the worry that the authority of the referee would be fatally undermined by gadgetry.

In Blatter’s words: “In refereeing we have to rely on human beings – and human beings make mistakes.”

An unarguable assertion, but does it make any sense not to correct those mistakes when the means of doing so is easily available? Nor is Blatter’s cautious approach necessarily shared by the people he is trying to protect. Linesman Rob Lewis commented: “My view, and I think it is shared by most referees, is that for matter of fact issues like whether the ball has crossed the line, technology should be introduced.”

It could be that a slight crack is appearing in FIFA’s anti-technology armor. Later this month, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) will meet for its annual review of the game’s rules. The final item on its agenda, under “Items for Discussion,” reads simply: The Ball.

This is not just any old ball – this one has been developed by Adidas and it has a built-in microchip that (with accompanying technology) will indicate instantly to the referee whether the ball has crossed the goal line or not. Or so Adidas tells us.

This is a very tricky area. Soccer’s rules say that, for a goal to be awarded, all of the ball must have crossed all of the goal line. Which means that the ball can solidly hit the ground beyond the line, but as long as any part of its circumference – even one millimeter! – is still overhanging the line, no goal can be given, or should be indicated by the microchip ball.

Inevitably, there are considerable doubts that the new technology could be that sensitive. Another strike against the new ball is cost, for it needs ancillary equipment. Is it worth installing an expensive system that might be used only once, or not at all, in an entire season?

There are also commercial entanglements to be considered. FIFA has a contract with Adidas (the new ball has been developed with the 2006 World Cup in mind), but many of the world’s top leagues, including those in England, Spain, and the U.S., do not use Adidas balls. Would those leagues be willing to abandon their contracts with Nike or Mitre or Puma to use a much more expensive ball whose benefits may never be used?

Such considerations are for the future. IFAB is a conservative body that moves with tortoise-like deliberation. And Blatter has announced that he will seek a further term in office, which could carry his anti-technology stand through until 2011.

For the moment, a more likely approach to solving this embarrassing goal-or-not predicament may be an increase in the number of fallible human beings: a couple of extra officials, one at each end, patrolling the goal lines.

But that may be one step too far for the long-suffering soccer officials. To be confined to the area directly in front of the behind-the-goal fans, always the rowdiest section of the crowd… and then to deny those fans what they are convinced is a goal? Who would want to be a goal-line judge?

As the soccer world mulls these questions, the man whose gaffe caused the kerfuffle, Roy Carroll, can take heart from the fact that he also caused a rare moment of agreement between two of the Premier league’s sworn enemies, ManU coach Alex Ferguson and Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger.

“It hammers home […] that technology should play a part in the game,” Ferguson said after the game against Tottenham. Wenger: “It just reinforces what I feel – there should be video evidence.”