Could the days of picking a best 22 come to an end?
The AFLW competition already plays 16-a-side, and now Hawthorn premiership coach Alastair Clarkson has raised reducing AFL playing numbers as an option to increase scoring.
"I was part of a wave of coaches ... who pushed the defensive mechanisms of the game and how important it was to prevent the opposition from scoring," Clarkson told radio station SEN.
"No club plays one v one anymore, it's all zones. That type of zoning and connection between one another to defend has become very sophisticated across all teams. The upshot of that is no bugger can score anymore.
"We have to consider pulling some levers on the game. One of the charters of the game is we wanted to retain 18 v 18. If defences have become so sophisticated in being able to use 18 men to defend, I wonder if they could defend as well with 16. Probably not."
Clarkson referenced the old VFA competition which played with 16 per side and had "full-forwards kicking 15, 18 goals a game".
"It's not about trying to get it back to that. Is it, [do] we go 16-a-side, do we employ zones? If we don't do any of those two things, then we probably need to look at the way the game's officiated and say to ourselves: How can we reduce the congestion?" Clarkson said.
"Do we reward holding the ball more regularly, so we don't have three, four or five stoppages in a row where as many as 20 players get to that area of the ground and congest it?
"The excitement of the game now is who can break out of the bubble, like Brisbane, then have it spit into space so Charlie Cameron can sprint ahead of everyone else, get the footy and kick a scintillating goal. That's about the only genuine excitement that we're seeing in our game at the moment.
"I think it's probably going to need a correction from city hall (AFL head office) either in pulling the lever around the number of players on the field, or zones, or it's going to take something like an adjudication-type thing that reduces the congestion to allow players to be able to play."
