The Confederation of African Football (CAF), Africa’s top football ruling body, has said it will not be using the goal line technology that the football’s global ruling body FIFA approved yesterday.
CAF’s secretary general Hicham El Amrani said: “We have to wait for FIFA to evaluate this process before we can implement it. It’s too late for next year’s tournament considering that it is starting in less than 80 days’ time.”
Amid wide expectation that the technology would be debuted at the 2013 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) in South Africa in January 2013, El Amrani said that, while CAF would have loved to use the technology, FIFA did not speed up the process that led to the approval of “the highly controversial technology”.
According to El Amrani, FIFA’s evaluation process took longer than expected.
He however dispelled assertions that the African football ruling body is opposed to the technology, saying the rejection for the January tournament is purely logistic. Expectations are high that CAF would readily approve the technology for use in subsequent tournaments.
“The technology may be introduced in Africa for the first time during the 2015 Nations Cup as the world body has approved plans to test it at the 2012 Club World Cup in Japan in December,” he said.
FIFA on Thursday approved the introduction of either of two goal line technologies – Hawk-Eye or Goal-Ref systems – for use worldwide in response to calls by football fans across the world to eliminate human errors that had marred the integrity of game officials in several matches.
The approved technologies sense whether a ball has crossed the goal line and will be used at the Club World Cup in December, the Confederations Cup in 2013 and the 2014 World Cup.
Members of the International Football Association Board (IFAB), which are the custodians of the game’s laws, voted at the Zurich headquarters of FIFA in favour of the technologies following nine months of testing in England, Germany, Hungary and Italy.
