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Football focus - Stoke

Sheffields Finest

Sheffields Finest

Maybe I'm foolish, maybe I'm blind!
Level 7 Referee
Snow flurries at The Britannia and the pitch lines are marked in blue! Never seen that before! Has to be allowed but never seen it! Have you?
 
The Ref Stop
Yes. One of Spurs games when we had that "Beast from the East" was played with blue markings I think.

Prior to that though, nope, never seen it before.
 
Up until a few years ago, the lines had to be white.

That changed to simply require that they had contrast and were identifiable, etc. Likely for situations like this (and to account for multi-use artificial fields).
 
Sheffields Finest said:
Snow flurries at The Britannia and the pitch lines are marked in blue! Never seen that before! Has to be allowed but never seen it! Have you?
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I'm sure I read somewhere that GLT (e.g. Hawkeye) didn't work with lines other than white. Maybe they've fixed this issue or, maybe they are willfully playing without GLT. If the latter, doesn't that affect the integrity of the competition?
 
Yampy said:
I'm sure I read somewhere that GLT (e.g. Hawkeye) didn't work with lines other than white. Maybe they've fixed this issue or, maybe they are willfully playing without GLT. If the latter, doesn't that affect the integrity of the competition?
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I can't find anything to confirm or deny Hawkeye having a requirement for a particular colour of line but I can't see why it would matter, based on the technology it uses.

Hawkeye doesn't decide if the ball has crossed the line by looking at a still image of the ball and the line - that's not how it works.

Rather, it uses an array of cameras to track the ball and calculates its path in relation to a computer model of the playing surface stored in a database.

According to their patent application, the Hawkeye system works as follows:

"In each frame sent from each camera, the system identifies the group of pixels which corresponds to the image of the ball. It then calculates for each frame the position of the ball by comparing its position on at least two of the physically separate cameras at the same instant in time. A succession of frames builds up a record of the path along which the ball has travelled. It also "predicts" the future flight path of the ball and where it will interact with any of the playing area features already programmed into the database."

So while it does need to be able to see the ball (one of its drawbacks, if you ask me) it doesn't actually 'look' at the lines, just a stored model of them.
 
I can see why it was given, though I initially thought it was one of those 'orange' card offences that could go either way depending on the referee and the angle you viewed it at.

I thought the ref got it spot on.
 
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As his pace has declined his dirty side has shone through, I think this is a last chance saloon for Little Charlie!!
 
Hmm..if yellow had come out, i don't think anyone would have picked up on it. Several replays later and the ref got it right
 
The way the patent for the Hawkeye technology is written, it doesn't appear that it uses its cameras to detect the lines at all, it just compares the track of the ball to "playing area features already programmed into the database," so I would say that the colour of the line does not even enter into consideration.

Other systems use sensors in the ball and the frame of the goal so again, the colour of the line would not be a factor.
 
The line colours are nothing to do with technology, rather it is simply that they are easier to see if red or blue and they get partially covered in snow.
 
RustyRef said:
The line colours are nothing to do with technology, rather it is simply that they are easier to see if red or blue and they get partially covered in snow.
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Yes, I know - but I was replying as part of the discussion stemming from the following comment in an earlier post:

"I'm sure I read somewhere that GLT (e.g. Hawkeye) didn't work with lines other than white."
 
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