Not a good weekend for video technology in sport, then. About as good a weekend, in fact, as it was for the turkeys on Bernard Matthews’s farm.

First, at Twickenham, we had Donal Courtney, an official so reluctant to poop Jonny Wilkinson’s party that he awarded the heroic fly half a dodgy try. An uplifting story maybe, but shaping the script for maximum dramatic impact is not the television match official’s job.

Then cut to White Hart Lane on Sunday where, after Cristiano Ronaldo’s tumble in the penalty area, Ray Wilkins and George Graham were shown countless slow-motion replays from Sky’s multitude of angles and asked for their verdict. “No penalty,” Wilkins said. “Penalty” Graham said. They were still arguing about it an hour later; and they are the studio experts who are meant to shed light on controversial incidents.

Say “no” to video replays in football. It should not really need repeating and yet there remain many intelligent men, with the admirable Arsãne Wenger, the Arsenal manager, at the head of the parade, who not only continue to talk about technology’s advance as inevitable but deride the rest of us as Luddites.

This is not the goalline technology that the whole world supports, certainly if it can be done with sensors providing an immediate signal (cameras would be a slower alternative), but replays to judge penalty appeals, offsides, dives and a range of offences that technology’s proponents rarely define.

These same people regularly accuse football of living in the Stone Age and yet struggle to explain why other sports far more suited to change embrace it very slowly. Cricket, for example, which may have allowed the fourth official to rule on stumpings and run-outs but has only dabbled in science.

One Australian company claims that infra-red cameras can determine irrefutably whether a ball has touched glove, pad or bat on the way through, but that responsibility remains with the umpires.

Nor is there any great rush to use video replays even though the natural breaks in cricket would mean far less disruption than in football. A lengthy experiment in New Zealand with video technology has shown that umpires have been very reluctant to refer leg-before decisions to the man with the monitor for fear of endlessly slowing the game down.

If that is their worry in cricket, then imagine what effect it could have on a high-tempo sport. How many times would the video official need to see Ronaldo’s tumble before the game could continue? Quite a few and he might still not be sure which way to jump in the Graham-Wilkins divide?

Replays would obviously mean fewer mistakes but the delays would make the game almost unrecognisable. It would mark the greatest change in a joyously free-flowing sport since a bunch of former public school boys gathered in Cambridge 159 years ago to write down the first set of modern rules.

It would be mad to turn away from all technological advance and someone will always come up with a compromise that sounds sensible. The FA Premier League, for example, has recommended that violent off-the-ball incidents caught on camera could be dealt with during a game so that justice can be summary. It is reasonable suggestion, but how many cases are there a season? Less than a handful.

We all make mistakes, even journalists. Just how Courtney made his error on Saturday has yet to be satisfactorily explained but he will be allowed to continue officiating throughout this RBS Six Nations Championship. “We judge officials over several games and not on one error,” a spokesman for the IRB said yesterday, which is very civilised. It is certainly un-football-like.

One can only imagine the wild conspiracies that José Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, might proffer in similar circumstances or Wenger, who claimed a couple of seasons ago that “Manchester United would be in mid-table if officials had the benefit of video replays”. You get the picture. Introducing video technology into football would open up a whole new field of unwanted controversy rather than close one down.

Forgive and forget flawed experiment

West Ham United’s Icelandic owners have already started gathering their defence should it be proved that Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tévez were effectively ineligible players this season. They will point out that the contracts under investigation were agreed by Paul Aldridge, the former chief executive, who departed Upton Park soon after their takeover of the Barclays Premiership club in November.

They will remind the FA Premier League that Eggert Magnússon, the chairman, questioned the deal for the two Argentinians as soon as he arrived at the club and said that he would never enter a similar arrangement where the club surrendered control of its players to an outside agency — the issue that appears to put West Ham in contravention of rule U18.

They will also point to a ruling 13 years ago when Alan Sugar successfully fought against a 12-point deduction and FA Cup ban for Tottenham Hotspur because the 35 financial irregularities at White Hart Lane had been committed by a previous regime.

“Any penalties will be visited not upon the people to blame but those who are guiltless,” an arbitration tribunal concluded in wiping out the sanctions, a useful precedent for West Ham to cite.

The East London club are not out of the woods, but, with all that in mitigation, the chance of a points deduction seems unlikely.

And whether Brighton & Hove Albion, whom Tévez helped to knock out of the FA Cup, can be bothered to mount a claim for compensation is also doubtful.

The fact is that Magnússon inherited a situation in which he had two players on salaries of £1.7 million, who, it appears, could not only be moved on against the club’s wishes, but at the time of someone else’s choosing and with West Ham receiving a tiny cut of the fee. Whatever his rivals demand by way of punishment, Magnússon can argue that he has already suffered enough.

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