Quote:
FIFA today announced that the 2014 World Cup finals will start on 12 June and finish on 13 July.
At a news conference in Rio, FIFA president Sepp Blatter also announced that a decision whether to introduce goalline technology would be taken at next March's meeting in London of the International FA Board, the game's lawmakers.
If approved, he said, it could be implemented at the World Cup finals two years later.
FIFA also announced that the World Cup play-off system, heavily criticised after Thierry Henry's infamous handball for France against the Republic of Ireland, would be maintained.
Will be interesting to see if there are any developments on the goal-line technology front, but has the play-off system itself come in for heavy criticism? I didn't think so. I think the play-off system is fair enough. The problem when we were drawn against France was that a decision was taken after the groups were completed to seed the play-off draw after the groups had already been seeded originally. Essentially, it was unnecessarily making things twice as hard for teams like us as we'd fairly finished second after initial seeding just like all the other teams who'd finished second. The seeding was my only issue with those play-offs (and the introduction of basketball rules for a split second during extra-time in our away leg, obviously).