HIDDEN away in an empty stadium in Belfast, the bizarre story of the 65-second football match could be one that changes football forever.

Under normal circumstances, a qualifier for the Women’s Under-19 European Championships would not even register on the wider public’s radar, but Thursday night’s game between England and Norway set one of the strangest precedents in the history of the game, one which UEFA may end up regretting.

Leah Williamson’s name will be the answer to a thousand future quiz questions after the 18-year-old scored the penalty which sent England to the tournament finals in Israel. But the significance lies not in the outcome but the fact that the other 95 minutes of the match were played five days earlier, and in the appeal process which brought about the surreal scene on Thursday night.

The two sides had played on Saturday and in the 96th minute, with the score at 2-1 to Norway, England were awarded a penalty. Up stepped Williamson for her Hollywood moment. Seconds left on the clock, her versus the keeper. Score and her team qualify; miss and they’re out. She strode into her run-up, defying her nerves, and stroked the ball into the bottom corner to spark wild celebrations among her teammates. But they were ended by the whistle of referee Marija Kurtes, who had spotted an England player encroaching into the area before it had been taken and disallowed the goal. What Kurtes should have done at this point, according to the laws of the game, was order the penalty to be re-taken; instead, she gave the Norwegians a free kick which effectively ended the match.

England appealed and UEFA decided in their favour, setting up Thursday night’s re-enactment of the game’s final seconds, starting from the penalty being taken, which required everything from the venue to the players to be the same as it was before. As if all that wasn’t strange enough, England were forced into making an official substitution because one of their players had been injured in intervening game against Switzerland. But what might the fallout of UEFA’s decision be for future games?

A similar thing has occurred before in a World Cup qualifier between Uzbekistan and Bahrain. On that occasion 38 minutes had passed when the referee made an identical mistake, but that time FIFA ordered the entire match to be replayed. Likewise, Arsenal and Sheffield United once replayed an FA Cup match after the Gunners’ winning goal had been scored in unsporting circumstances. The difference on those occasions was that the disputed moment wiped out the entire match and they started again from scratch. This latest ruling accepted everything that had happened so far in the game, and only saw fit to replay from the penalty onwards.

Difficult questions arise from this. Was that the only decision the referee had got wrong in the entire 96 minutes of football? To suppose Kurtes had an absolutely flawless performance until that point is improbable, so what of her other errors? Right and wrong being absolutes, is football now to work on a sliding scale where decisions can range from being slightly wrong to very wrong? How wrong must one be before a game warrants reassembly days after the final whistle has blown?

This is the Pandora’s box UEFA has opened, and it will likely have to deal with repercussions playing out in arenas where the stakes are much higher than the Women’s Under-19 European Championship. Let’s fast forward to May and consider a hypothetical scenario, in which a wrongly awarded penalty has given Bayern Munich an away goals lead over Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final. In injury time Luka Modric then slides the ball through to Cristiano Ronaldo, who smashes it past Manuel Neuer to win the tie. Replays show Ronaldo was three feet offside, but on the touchline the assistant referee’s flag has stayed down — wrong once again.

How do we apply Williamson’s precedent to this? Both Kurtes’ and our imaginary assistant referee erred in a way that cost one side the game, but is this scenario also wrong enough to merit a replay? If Bayern appealed, could Real then counter-appeal against the penalty which put them behind in the first place? At which point in the match did one incorrect decision render all that followed it null and void? Do 80,000 fans then need to be shipped back into the Bernabéu to watch the last moments being replayed in order to keep all variables the same?

This might seem pedantic but the law is all about the details, and when a Champions League final is the prize, it is not unlikely that clubs will clutch at every straw available to them. Errors are a part of the game, until now we have grumbled about them but ultimately had no choice other than to simply stomach them. What UEFA has done now is create a tipping point at which wrong becomes too wrong and can no longer be accepted, and a loophole has therefore appeared through which defeated teams might earn a second chance. Harsh as it may have been for the England ladies, perhaps it would have been best never to have opened it in the first place.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hugo Saye is an English journalist who spent nine months in Jamaica shadowing 2012-2013 National Premier League champions Harbour View FC, where he spoke openly with stars of both sport and politics and discovered the importance of football in the Caribbean island, which formed the background of his book, Of Garrisons and Goalscorers.