Football's technophobia helped keep Chelsea in the Premier League title race

Football's technophobia helped keep Chelsea in the Premier League title race and may have relegated Tottenham Hotspur to the Europa League after match officials wrongly adjudged that a Frank Lampard shot had crossed the line in this London derby.

"Anybody who has got any sense and understands football knows goalline technology should be used. It takes seconds," said Harry Redknapp, whose goalkeeper, Heurelho Gomes, fumbled Lampard's drive when Spurs were leading 1-0. Au contraire. It takes decades to change Fifa's thinking on the kind of machinery that would tell a referee whether a ball had crossed a white mark on the grass, answers that are instantly available in tennis, cricket, rugby league and many American sports.

Chelsea won with a goal that never was and a disputed 89th-minute winner by Salomon Kalou, who some observers believed was offside. "It takes five seconds to get the right decision [with technology]," Redknapp said. "People say it's part of the fun of the game. How is that part of the fun, a goal that isn't a goal?"

One day football may accept that a simple piece of machinery could be of use in a game where one team is defending their Premier League title and the other is trying to secure a Champions League place for next season.

A game, in other words, in which careers are at stake and tens of millions of pounds wait to be shared out. For many, the case for goalline technology was rendered open and shut by Lampard's non-awarded goal in England's second-round tie with Germany at the World Cup in South Africa. But Fifa continue to regard technology the way the judge regarded the "video recorder" in the Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch.

Less than a year after the World Cup, Lampard was again at the heart of an incident that demonstrated the sport's Luddite leanings when he drove a shot from 30 yards, which Gomes spilled under his body then scrambled to halt the ball as it dribbled towards his line. Replays showed that only about three‑quarters of it crossed the chalk.

It was such a marginal call that the match officials could only really place an even-money bet – and they plumped wrongly for the goal, thus nullifying Tottenham's lead, a spectacular long-rang effort from Sandro, who then featured in the first known case of a footballer scoring a beautiful goal and then being harangued by his manager, for persistently moving out of position.

Mike Cairns, the assistant referee (or linesman, as we all know them), convinced himself the Lampard "goal" was good. "He's guessed really. No one could see from there," Redknapp said. "He's on the 18-yard line, looking back from there. He's had a guess and he's guessed wrong. He hasn't done it on purpose because he wanted Chelsea to win and Spurs to lose. It was a mistake, but it happens all the time. Why can't the fourth official, instead of telling you get back in your box, look at a screen and say 'goal', or 'no goal'? The whole ball has to cross the line. That ball didn't cross the line."

Plenty was at stake for both sides. Chelsea started the day six points behind Manchester United and were facing a barren summer, 12 months after their Premier League and FA Cup Double. Carlo Ancelotti's job was on the line. With all this in the balance, it may seem sensible to copy the example set by other sports and halt the game briefly to consult a camera or cyclops eye trained along the goalline.

But football recoils from these innovations. Too arrogant to pause in the interests of fair play, it nevertheless exists in a permanent state of rancour as post-match controversies roll on and on.

Spurs have been here before, as victims rather than beneficiaries. A few years back Manchester United's Roy Carroll made a mess of a long chip by Tottenham's Pedro Mendes and found himself desperately chasing the bouncing ball back into his own net. Carroll scooped it out, long after it had crossed the line, and the goal was not given. The game was reduced to farce that night, as it was when Lampard's shot hit the crossbar and bounced over the line in Bloemfontein.

Gomes is another recurring problem. This was the second time in 18 days that he failed to deal with a low shot and deflected it towards his own net. After their 4-0 defeat to Real Madrid in Spain, Spurs needed a reassuring win at home to end their Champions League journey on a high. Instead Gomes made a horlicks of a speculative Cristiano Ronaldo drive and another fumbled effort bobbled in.

In the stands at White Hart Lane, faith in the Brazilian keeper will sink to an all-time low. A win at Stamford Bridge is among Spurs fans' deepest cravings. Tottenham were last victorious here in 1990 with a goal by Gary Lineker, who appeared in a hard-hitting pre-match Kick It Out video exhorting fans not to use the term yid, to which the Tottenham supporters immediately responded by chanting "Yid army". Still, it was a nice try.

On the evidence of this intense, fluctuating cross-London struggle, Spurs could do with a new keeper and football needs to come out of the Victorian age and stop relying on a man with a flag.

The allegations of spot-fixing made against Pakistan are the latest in a long line of incidents where the pernicious influence of money has damaged the game

Cricket was never a wholly clean game. Whatever we like to imagine, it has seldom been entirely free from the dangerous lure of money, whether it was gentlemen wagering on the outcome of matches during the gambling boom of the 18th century, WG Grace and his brother Edward fiddling the takings at Gloucestershire in the Victorian era, or Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting accepting wads of particularly filthy cash to lead tours to South Africa during the time of apartheid. But the alleged incidents of spot-fixing revealed by today's story in the News of the World will damage the sport's integrity as surely as if someone had detonated massive charges of high explosive under its foundations.

You would like to smack the idiots who allegedly accepted money to influence events in the fourth Test at Lord's, thus dealing a blow to the dreams of young boys and girls who grow up admiring the heroes of the game and aspiring to emulate their achievements. The fact that one of the current crop of apparent miscreants is a teenage bowler of great virtuosity in one of cricket's most arcane and appealing skills – that of swing bowling – makes it all the sadder, since he is just the sort of figure to inspire even younger people, in his homeland and elsewhere, to take up a game constantly under threat of obsolescence.

The case of the late Hansie Cronje, the former South African captain found guilty in 2000 of fixing matches, was one thing. Cronje may have been taken for a role model in his country, but he was a mature man and cricketer entering the final years of his career. He was deserving of no sympathy or regret, merely contempt for his venality and hypocrisy. At 18, Mohammad Amir is at the other end of his career and has it in him to become one of the greatest players in his country's history, as he showed with that mesmerising passage of play in which he captured four English wickets for no runs on Friday morning. If this case is proved, however, and it is hard to see how it can be defended in the light of the evidence presented today, his reputation will never be the same.

There will be regrets, too, about the role of Salman Butt, his 25-year-old captain, who made such a marvellous showing on his first Test appearance against England in Multan five years ago, contributing knocks of 74 and 122 to a thrilling victory by 22 runs, under the leadership of Inzamam‑ul‑Haq. But it is difficult to see how the preordained bowling of no-balls can take place without the connivance of a captain willing to adjust his bowlers' schedule to fit the plan.

And this scandal is, of course, the last thing Pakistan needed, whatever perspective is taken, from the narrow interests of a mere game to the plight of the millions left homeless by a natural disaster. Unable to play Test matches at home due to security issues, and with their gifted players prevented by the same considerations from joining the scramble for the millions available from the Indian Premier League and forced to watch others reap the rewards now available at the pinnacle of the game, they are perhaps uniquely vulnerable to such temptations.

This is a world, moreover, which is approaching that of 18th‑century England in its obsession with gambling, which assumes its most pernicious form when money is staked on failure. At one end of the scale lies George Soros's notorious $1bn winning bet on the collapse of sterling in 1992, while at the other lies Mohammad Amir's foot landing a few inches beyond the batting crease, just far enough to persuade the umpire to declare a no-ball and perhaps to net the culprit a few thousands pounds. In between lie the worlds of junk bonds, short-selling and spread betting, with bookmakers' logos on the front of the shirts of Premier League footballers and the pernicious Skybet slogan broadcast daily into British homes: "It matters more when there's money on it."

What we must do, as things stand, is congratulate the News of the World – owned, of course, by the mastermind of Sky – on this particular piece of journalism. The newspaper's successful efforts to expose the personal peccadilloes of such as Max Mosley and John Terry are hard to applaud, given their tenuous connection with any conceivable public interest, but when the same team brings its well-resourced ingenuity to bear on a subject such as fixing sporting events for gain, the result is of legitimate benefit to society. And, of course, to sport, which continues to develop its insatiable appetite for money from all sources to the point of helpless addiction while coming under ever increasing pressure to ensure that the public can believe what it sees.

Club and its squad of unknowns prepare to take on elite just 10 years after being in bottom tier of the league

At Darryl Linden's shop along the sea front, they sell football rock – Arsenal rock, Manchester United rock, Liverpool rock, all the top clubs. But what about the Blackpool FC rock? Linden pulled a face. "Blackpool rock? All rock is Blackpool rock, so to sell Blackpool Blackpool rock would just be confusing."

Blackpool are preparing for their first season in the Premier League and everything is a tangerine dream here. Buses are tangerine, tattoo parlours are tangerine, even the warning for CCTV cameras is a tangerine triangle. But again there is a surprising absence. Look up and down the prom, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a Blackpool FC shirt, which can be partly blamed on the late arrival of the new strip.

How different it was two months ago when the team returned triumphant from Wembley on their open-top bus and 60,000 people turned the promenade into a sea of orange. Tiny Blackpool with its 12,500 capacity and squad of unknowns, promoted to football's upper echelon; tiny Blackpool whose ground until recently consisted of two stands and an uncovered bit called the Gene Kelly because fans used to watch while singin' in the rain. The achievement of Ian Holloway's team was near miraculous (10 years ago Blackpool was in the fourth tier) and a needed boost for Britain's most famous seaside resort.

Blackpool still attracts 10 million visitors a year, but this is down from a peak of 17 million in 1992. Many of the shops are boarded up or shuttered down. Of those that remain, most are frozen in time – the endless chippies, the stores selling candyfloss and six sticks of rock for a pound (when your teeth fall out you can always replace them with a set of sugar dentures at a quid a go), the joke shops flogging pecker party whistles and water willy bath plugs. The clock that looks down on the town is permanently stuck at 4.09pm.

And there is the omnipresent tower. Whether you are at the football or the Pleasure Beach or peering through the alleys of back-to-back terraces, you can always see the tower, red and corroded and never quite as big as expected.

The age of Victorian grandeur is long gone. At times you can't move for rubble– rubble on the pier, rubble in the front rooms of closed-down B&Bs;, and rubble in the football ground desperately trying to complete its revamp for the season (the first home game tomorrow has already been moved away to Wigan).

Every item in Lynne Davies's bag shop is dazzlingly priced in tangerine stars and squares. A tribute to the football team? She grinned. "No, it's the only colour you can get." Davies, 61, remembers when the town had everything a girl could want. "It used to shine, Blackpool. It used to glitter. We got everybody, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. The theatres were buzzing. And now? Nothing. You used to go to the Tower Ballroom on a Saturday night, now it usually shuts at 5pm. Nobody can go dancing, and it's the most beautiful ballroom in the world. Terrible."

Most local people are proud of Blackpool – or at least of what Blackpool was. They talk with humour, knowledge and frustration about the local economy, and everybody has their own idea how it can be improved. Annual income is £16,800 compared with the UK average of £22,241, and it has one of the lowest life expectancy rates in England and Wales.

On the beach, a family of three were playing cricket with a plastic tangerine bat and tangerine wickets, and a couple of kids are kicking a tangerine football, but it was almost deserted. Debbie Clews and her seven donkeys shivered in the late afternoon cold. "I think it's the weather that's putting people off."

There are so many reasons Blackpudlians give for business being down – the recession, the stag and hen nights, cheap foreign holidays, the endless rubble. "I think it's a mixture of everything, to be honest," she said. "Hopefully more families will come to watch the football then continue walking along the promenade, and use all the facilities here."

Captain Custard, clown and balloon impresario, is a devoted Blackpool fan. "Last season I made a big orange and white balloon hat that stood 6ft tall on my head." He once made a Pudsey Bear out of 22,000 balloons that stood 22ft tall and made £22,000 for Children in Need. Will Blackpool stay up? "We're hoping they're going to be top, never mind staying up. We've all got 10,000-1 on us winning the Premier League."

But winning the title is almost beyond the bounds of possibility. After all, Blackpool pay their players a maximum £10,000 a week; their entire squad will probably earn less than the £200,000 a week Yaya Toure is getting at Manchester City. Plus there has already been trouble: Holloway, the manager, allegedly threatened to quit because of the lack of cash for new players.

Blackpool wasn't always a small club. In 1953, the team won the FA Cup in what became known as the Matthews final – coming from 3-1 down to beat Bolton Wanderers 4-3.

Bloomfield Road, the football ground, is attached to the Seasiders Community Learning Centre and Blackpool primary care trust – an organic part of the community. You can walk straight in and on to the pitch because one side is still open. The builders are furiously working to get the new stand ready, to increase capacity to a still tiny 16,000.

To the side of the rubble, there are thousands of tangerine seats waiting to see active service. When's it going to be finished? "Well the first home game is in two weeks so we've got to be ready for then," said one of the workmen.

Over at the souvenir shop, the club was learning fast about merchandising. The new tops had not yet arrived, but there were scarves, flags and old tops galore. Six-year-old Jessica Duckworth had just collected her season ticket and was thrilled. But not as thrilled as her father Gary. "I'm ecstatic beyond many a dream. I never thought I'd be able to see them in the Premier League," he said.

Who is Jessica's favourite player? "Charlie Adam," she whispered.

"Don't forget Brett [Ormerod]," Gary said. "He were there when Daddy were younger." Will they survive? "I'd like to think so. My head says no, my but heart says we can do it."

The IPL franchise's attempt to impose itself is irritating but the ECB will inevitably look to see what's in it for its own benefit

"The new face of cricket" was our headline on Tuesday morning, accompanied by a picture of cheerleaders "coming to a ground near you. So why would the ECB want to block it?" That's odd, I thought, because I was one of a small number involved in naming the new format and I could have sworn that Twenty20, with accompanying razzmatazz such as cheerleaders, dancers, bouncy castles and Atomic Kitten had been played successfully in this country since 2003.

The question was lightheartedly rhetorical, of course, but contained in the piece were a number of sound and serious reasons why the England and Wales Cricket Board has every right to be concerned about its ramparts being under siege from Rajasthan Royals.

I can understand the ambition of the Indian Premier League side to expand their interests. They may be part of a growing multi-million-dollar entity (although as Forbes magazine points out, roughly only one quarter as wealthy as the $2bn (£1.3bn) some claim for it) no longer making a loss on running costs but they have operated for only a few weeks a year. So there is no harm in trying to find ways to keep the wolf from the door.

And I can just about stomach yet more ethical and moral insights into Test cricket from Shane Warne, a fellow who speaks with spellbinding insight on his specialist subject of playing but whose rent-a-gob probity in other regards is diluted somewhat by a positive test for a diuretic which can be used as a masking agent and acceptance of money from a dubious subcontinental bookmaking source for providing "information". No matter that he is only answering questions posed to him. It is still drivel.

What really irks, though, is the sheer arrogance of Manoj Badale, Warne and Sean Morris, men who speak not of cricket but in the language of franchises, marketing models, brand awareness, business opportunities and bottom lines in trying to impose something upon a structure which is already overseen by another organisation. Not without a by-your-leave anyway, either from the ECB nor, it transpires, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, under whose auspices IPL is run. Badale and Morris might argue with good reason that their approach to link with Hampshire and other sides around the world and play a festival in this country has nothing to do with the IPL beyond their status as a franchise and therefore is strictly an initiative within their personal remit, but if the BCCI are correct, then good manners might demand a formal approach first.

The ECB did not see this coming. No mention was made at its one-day cricket symposium last week, on one of which panels sat Rod Bransgrove, the Hampshire chairman who has agreed to get into bed with Rajasthan and rename his county side appropriately. Bransgrove is a mighty successful businessman and something of a maverick too, who has a considerable personal stake in Hampshire. He wants a return and, besides which, any deal of his can only be enhanced if it has a built-in piss-off-Giles-Clarke factor, as this new alliance undoubtedly has. If the ECB chairman does not speak from the highest moral ground when it comes to hawking a team in search of big money, then his concerns about these planned exhibition games (for that is what they are) being played during the latter stages of its own domestic competition, and how, for instance, they cut across its deal with BSkyB for televising cricket, are real. As is the issue of a crowded or at least unruly domestic schedule that it is in the process of trying to defragment.

I imagine that somewhere along the line there will be a sensible accommodation. Badale is pushing to see how far he can get but no one is immune to progress or innovation: the ECB, an organisation which, lest we forget, is the counties', will be looking to see what is in it for its own benefit. No doubt it will sanction something for a price and, beyond the unedifying thought of other counties grovelling away with the begging bowl, there cannot be much harm in a name change and some different shirts. The idea that Hampshire supporters will automatically transfer off-season allegiance simply on the basis has to be fanciful, surely? It is enough trouble getting sufficient interest in Hampshire.

To be honest, I do not really care if Hampshire or Leicestershire or Middlesex or whoever want to sell themselves to a franchise. It will not disrupt the county competitions nor impact on international cricket at any level, which would be my concerns. Nor does it bother me if Cape Cobras or Victorian Bushrangers gain Royal approval. I do have a problem with the involvement of Trinidad and Tobago, however. Last time I looked, these two islands formed not a franchise but a country, for goodness sake – like India only smaller. Their national colours, in which they play one-day cricket, are red and black not the Rajasthan blue. It is different. How can you have a player exchange, as mooted, between a club and a country? How indeed can you sell out a country? Where is the pride to be had in that?

• Plans for annual Twenty20 festivals may fall foul of ECB
• Rajasthan link-up with Hampshire and Cape Cobras

Grand plans announced yesterday by the Rajasthan Royals to stage a Twenty20 cricket festival in England this July will be met with stiff resistance from the England and Wales Cricket Board. Rajasthan, who won the first Indian Premier League, launched their franchise concept at Lord's yesterday with their captain and former Hampshire player Shane Warne.

Rajasthan are entering into partnership with four teams from around the world, including Hampshire. The South African side Cape Cobras and Trinidad & Tobago are also joining the brand, while the Victorian Bushrangers are in negotiations.

A statement from the organisers read: "Royals2020 will be a dynamic partnership of leading cricket clubs with the aim of creating the 'World's First Global Sporting Franchise'."

The teams will play under the same name, wear identical kit and share players and profits. At the centre of the plan is a series of annual Royals Festivals, the first of which is slated to be staged in England over three days at the end of July. However, the ECB must rubber-stamp any professional tournament in England and there would be no advantage in sanctioning the competition in case it deflected attention away from the relaunch of England's own Twenty20 cup. The date suggested for the inaugural Royals Festival, somewhere among the 10 days at the end of July, would clash with the quarter-finals of the domestic Twenty20.

It is also believed that Sky TV would claim automatic rights to coverage of any tournament in England under the terms of its rights agreement and the ECB – already shaken by potential losses should the government rule that the Ashes must return to free-to-air television – would be bound to support them.

There is a third reason, too, why the ECB would oppose the idea: the criticism that the domestic programme is already overcrowded. The ECB has yet to receive an official application from Rajasthan Royals. When they do, it will be referred to a sub-committee, which will consider whether the proposals will benefit the game in England. Middlesex did gain authorisation for a one-day game against the Royals last summer, and if Hampshire requested the same the odds are that it would be rapidly agreed. A tournament, though, might well be regarded as a dangerous precedent.

The franchise concept will be monitored closely by other IPL teams, who are likely to follow suit. Middlesex and Leicestershire had also been in negotiations with Rajasthan. The Delhi Daredevils already have a memorandum of understanding with Nashua Titans of South Africa regarding player exchanges and commercial tie-ins and the Kolkata Knight Riders are known to be keen to get involved in the England.

The Rajasthan Royals chairman, Manoj Badale, acknowledged that the biggest single obstacle to be overcome in the scheme was the opposition of national boards.

"There is the potential for issues around scheduling, and around ensuring that anything we do with our partner clubs adheres to domestic regulations, and being sensitive about the media rights constraints that exist around the world." Despite that, further Royals Festivals have been scheduled to take place in Australia, South Africa and the UAE over the next 18 months.

Discussion over batting and bowling averages have been replaced with players' value in hard cash

This week saw a clearing of the decks – including the traditional last-minute wrangle with the England and Wales Cricket Board over who owns Paul Collingwood – ahead of Tuesday's 2010 IPL player auction. It's hard to know what to think about this. The IPL is still a confusing event even for the halitosis-ridden, Pot Noodle-reared, format-promiscuous cricket obsessive, for whom I feel I can cautiously speak. Fashionable opinion holds that the IPL is a form of cricketing revolution, a decisive power-shift from wonkily extrapolated Victorian lawn game to subcontinental billionaire's beano; a post-colonial land grab set to the music of Haddaway and Maroon Five and spiced with lingering shots of bored well-groomed women in big sunglasses.

English cricket, on the other hand, has tended to see the IPL in the same way the English once viewed America, as an essentially silly thing that will, with any luck, soon blow over or go away. Three years into its strangely dreamlike and fevered existence, it still feels as if the IPL could go either way. Is it a fatally underrated agent of change? Or something entirely self-sustaining, a goons' rodeo of careening self-importance, Ozymandias in pyjamas?

Maybe the auction will offer some more hints. This is, after all, an event that has a voodoo grip on England's Test team, for whom every thunk of the price-tag gun is like a hatpin to the heart. Last year's auction overlapped with England being bowled out for 51 in Jamaica. This time around we've already seen auction hopeful Jonathan Trott flailing about like a half-cut gamekeeper chasing squirrels with a yard broom during the collapse at the Wanderers.

The auction is unlike anything that has ever happened in any sport, but entirely in tune with the IPL's flat-packed transactional theatre. The IPL needed a transfer market: and here is one in its most literal form, a clearing house where cricket's traditional measure, statistics, is replaced by an unarguable cash value.

It must be thrilling, and frightening, to have your worth so mercilessly totted up. Perhaps not for Trott and Eoin Morgan, hard-bitten hired guns for whom the IPL is a natural home. But you fear for the Scratchcard hopefuls Usman Afzaal and rank outsider Anthony McGrath, whose defiant yen to play at the IPL after resigning the Yorkshire captaincy brings to mind the kind of ballsy middle-aged divorcee who gets her hair done and buys a sports car with the number plate PARTIGRL and goes off on a riotous waiter-fellating cruise of the Greek islands.

The IPL is clearly important. But is this just because it's new and rich? It has always seemed shocking that cricket could go from an aura of august and starchy reserve to prostrating itself before a podium-gyrating version of sporting mammon, Big Money Twenty20's pure sporting pornography, a thrusting, gurning shortcut to an endless money shot, in this case the pinch-bludgeoned, cow corner switch-scoop. Not that our auction lots will be concerned as they flex and grin for the casting panel. The IPL is important, but it seems increasingly unlikely to destroy anything. It's too sui generis, too one‑track and – with an exhausting 60 matches over 40 days – too bloated with its own founding greed to look like an exclusive version of the future.