Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson has called for the AFL to make a radical change to the fundamental's of the game to reduce the amount of congestion.
Clarkson believes that if the league reduce the amount of the players on the field to 16 players per team, it will create more space and increase scoring.
“I was part of a wave of coaches, probably myself and Ross (Lyon) and a couple of others, who pushed the defensive mechanisms of the game and how important it was to prevent opposition from scoring and defence wins premierships and all this type of stuff,” Clarkson told SEN Breakfast.
“The upshot of that is no bugger can score anymore."
“We probably have to consider pulling some levers, now one of the charters of the game is we said we wanted to retain 18 versus 18."
“If defences have become so sophisticated to defend. I wonder if they could defend as well with 16. Probably not."
Clarkson recalled the old VFA competition, which played with 16 per side and had full forwards kicking bags of goals.
“I can remember the old VFA when they did have 16-per-team and looking up the paper and on Sunday the VFA would play and I’d always look up the results because there was full forwards kicking 15 or 18 goals a game,” Clarkson said.
“It’s not about trying to get it back to that, but is it we go 16-a-side, do we employ zones, if we don’t do either of those two things, then we probably need to look at how the game is officiated."
Clarkson also believes that the correct adjudication of the game could pave the way for a free-scoring contest.
"How can we reduce congestion? Do we reward holding the ball more regularly so we don’t have three, four or five stoppages in a row where we don’t have 20 or 25 players get to that area of the ground and congest it?"
“We love the contest and we love that these games are close because defences are so strong and teams can’t score high scores in quick periods of time, but it’s going to be really interesting to see how the game evolves, but it’s probably going to need a correction from city hall either in pulling a lever in the number of players on the field or zones or it’s going to take something like an adjudication type of thing to allow players to play.”
