While shooting the breeze in a notorious penitentiary, Fifa president Sepp Blatter and his 23 chums will also be confined in a prison of outdated convictions.

They're unlikely to escape, because they can't see the prison bars. While the gathering has been billed as a crisis meeting to discuss the "Hand of Henry" scandal, along with Uefa's match-fixing inquiry, it probably won't spark the video revolution football desperately needs.

Blatter is reportedly only willing to back the adoption at the World Cup of Michel Platini's refereeing innovation, currently being given a trial in the Europa League: an extra assistant referee is stationed behind each goal line. And Blatter's word is all but law.

Platini's goalmouth refs help, but only a bit. They filter out handballs and dives, and spot penalties. But travesties of justice happen all over the pitch, and many can only be spotted in slow motion.

Everyone accepts that it's impossible to keep football entirely fair and honest - but that doesn't mean we should give up on the pursuit of that unattainable ideal.

Fifa's cobwebbed argument is that occasional refereeing errors are inevitable, and that football has thrived for decades while accepting them.

But Henry's handball - while morally no worse than millions of similar offences committed daily across planet football - has shaken the game's foundations. Its massive consequences exposed the absurdity of tolerating preventable bad decisions. A giant penny has dropped in the mind of the football public.

Two (puny) objections to video referees have been voiced by Fifa in the past. Firstly, they want football's rules to be consistent at every level of the game, and video officials are not a viable expense in amateur and lower-league football games.

So what? Consistency of rules is a pointless - even destructive - ideal if it consistently yields injustice at the highest levels. Who cares or suffers if the professional and amateur versions of the game are slightly different?

The second objection is more substantial: there's a fear that the frequent interruptions of video decisions will ruin football's relentless flow of action, one of its greatest assets.

Fair enough. But a dash of lateral thinking would solve the problem, and prevent the often redundant video calls that happen in rugby and cricket.

As in tennis, a challenge system could work. Each team would be allowed an "account" of challenges, perhaps three or four per game.

These would be made by the team captain to appeal against any decision: a penalty, a handball or offside goal, an unjustified red card.

In the event of a challenge, the referee would be obliged to refer the decision via radio communication, to the video referee, who would be watching the action live, from a box high in the stands. He would watch replays filmed from several angles, and approve or reverse the decision.

The Times columnist Julia Beffon has an interesting idea: coaches should be able to challenge decisions, with a substitution lost for every unsuccessful challenge.

If the substitutions have been used up, a player comes off the pitch.

Perhaps strikers should be allowed to challenge the linesman (without his captain or coach's permission) if he knows he has been wrongly flagged offside - by playing on, and attempting to score. If the striker nets, the video ref would review the move, and award the goal if necessary. Perhaps such offside challenges could be held in a separate "account".

Three appeals per team would limit the time used up by video calls to between six and 12 minutes per game - hardly a huge disruption.

In many games, appeals would be left unused. Referees a do an excellent job on the whole, and would do an even better job if they were more relaxed, as they would be with video backup.

An appeals system would also add a thrilling dash of suspense - it would soup up Fifa's product, and make the World Cup, its signature product, even more unmissable.

But most importantly, it would give the game a much-needed infusion of credibility, fairness and trust.

Don't hold your breath. The video revolution won't happen before the World Cup.

But the scandals will keep on coming, and the views of the game's audience can't be ignored forever.