KEY POINTS:
Michel Platini was a genius on the football field. He was, perhaps, the best passer of a ball the game has seen.
A goalscorer - yes, that too - but primarily he was a maker of goals; with a magical pass that put a man in space or found a man when no one could quite comprehend how he had even seen him.
He had vision and poise; elegance and execution. He could read a game as easily as we read the comics in the morning paper. He was a dignified, creative, artistic example of football at its best.
Pity he's such a moron when it comes to video technology.
Platini is now the president of UEFA, the body which oversees European football.
He is also opposed to introducing video technology. This is enormously stupid.
Proof was furnished by the recent match between Reading and Watford in the English Championship where an infamous "ghost" goal was allowed by the linesman and referee.
The ball crossed the goal line some four metres wide of the Watford goal but the linesman, Nigel Bannister, signalled a goal. Astonishingly, the 25-year-old referee, Stuart Attwell, allowed the goal to stand.
The Watford players, not surprisingly, went mental and several received yellow cards for dissent.
The Reading players, also not surprisingly, did Easter Island statue impressions and said not a word, even though none of them had appealed for the goal that so clearly wasn't. Don't you love the honesty in football?
The video replay showed demonstrably that no goal was scored. But the authorities would not rule it out as the referee's decision is final.
Nor would they replay the match, drawn 2-2 after Watford equalised with a late penalty, correctly awarded by Attwell.
So a match which should have been a 2-1 win to Watford remains a draw because football has no mechanism to right such a wrong.
Platini's view is that video technology would take too long. "Matches would take four hours," he sniffed. "Someone will take a free kick, someone else will score with his hand and the referee won't see it," Platini told the Dauphine Libere newspaper.
"OK, so we use the video. But before he scored with his hand, a defender pushed him in the back and there was a penalty.
"And maybe the free kick wasn't valid. That's enough."
He also said that if video replays were used, there would be no refs left in 10 years.
As we say in France: "Huh?" I think he's had too many garlic snails, this boy.
I could feel a huge, irritation-fuelled generalisation welling up in me, seeking to rail at the French. You know the sort of thing - how we should all light the little wicks on the top of their berets or some such... Until I realised that the erudite Frenchman and coach of Arsenal, Arsene Wenger, is in favour of video technology too.
It's quite simple - either it's a goal or or it's not. Either the sport embraces getting the right result or it doesn't. Rugby league in this part of the world leads the way in video refs. It doesn't take an age and, even when it does, it still adds to the drama of things, for Pete's sake...
There was some criticism recently in the NRL play-offs that there was too much use of the video referee. Maybe refs could rule what they see a bit more often - but you can understand them deferring to the technology. It gets more time and more views than they do. I'd rather have that than a goal allowed or a try scored when it wasn't.
Platini says there will be no refs left if the sport adopts technology. Well, if they make mistakes like Mr Attwell, good.
I can understand - just - how the linesman might have erred with a side-on view but what was the ref doing? Was he trying to peek down the front of the big blonde in row nine? Or was he thinking about his steak and kidney pie after the match?
Platini's solution is to - wait for it - have more referees. He would add an extra two in the penalty area to police whether a penalty is a penalty or whether it is a dive and to check whether goals are scored.
Spare me. More refs? I need a lie down and a glass of Bordeaux. No, make that a Hawke's Bay Gimblett Gravels, if the French production of Bordeaux wine is as cloudy and muddled as Platini's thinking re technology. In fact, give me a glass of water from the Mangere sewerage ponds - it'll still not reek of effluent as much as Platini's thinking.
More refs doesn't mean they will be any more accurate. Try and discern, at the next game of football you watch, whether a player going down in the penalty area is shamming or was indeed felled by an opponent. It's not easy.
There's an old joke that if you were watching either Germany or Tottenham Hotspur when Jurgen Klinsmann was playing for them and you got up to make a cup of tea and you bumped the TV, Klinsmann would fall over. But key incidents can be impossible to pick with the naked eye; at speed.
The head of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, has the view that such wrongdoings as Reading's ghost goal add to the drama of the game.
No, it doesn't. It just adds to the perception that it is run by nongs who wouldn't recognise the need for the purity of a result and credibility in the game if it was wrapped around a broom handle and forcibly inserted in their bottoms - although this would at least have the useful by-product of having the floor swept wherever they went.
Technology in football is inevitable. It's just a matter of when.
Platini seems set to solve refereeing quality problems by increasing the quantity of referees.
It's a non-sequitur to rival that of notorious football manager Tommy Docherty who once said: "My doctor told me to take a complete break from football so I became manager of Wolves."
