Having watched a lot of the Twenty20 World Cup over the past few weeks, it has become glaringly obvious and apparent that cricket does something much better than footy.
No, it's not stopping play once the rain arrives and preventing players from returning to the field if it's too wet (after all the AFL has Marvel Stadium to keep their athletes nice and dry).
And it's not the advent of the ‘zing' bails and stumps, although it would be interesting to see a goal post light up like a Christmas tree if it got hit by a footy.
It's the limitation of video reviews per team for each game.
Although two reviews per team in a 20-over innings is probably way overboard, the rationale behind limiting each team to tap into the TV umpire remains sound.
Of course, the use of technology in both cricket and footy isn't a new thing, in fact it's been around for quite some time in both sports.
But something about seeing its implementation in a world cup on these shores this year has hit home harder than usual, especially considering how the length of AFL games has become such a hot topic of discussion in recent years, with games routinely going for two-and-a-half hours, and sometimes nudging two hours and 40 minutes.
One of the driving factors behind this inflation of game time is undoubtedly the regular and liberal use of the score review system by umpires, with a decent portion of those referrals bewildering considering how blatantly obvious the outcome will be.
A sure-fire way to prevent the unnecessary waste of time would be to take the power of the review out of the hands of the umpires, and place it solely in the hands of the players with each team getting, say, 1-2 unsuccessful reviews each game, kind of like in cricket, tennis and basketball.
You'd probably limit the power of the review to players within 50m of the contentious call, after all, you wouldn't want the full forward or full back being able to request a review from more than 100m away from the action.
Of course, not every footy game is afflicted by numerous, and sometimes ridiculous, score review requests.
According to The Age, there were 127 score reviews in the first 17 rounds of this year's AFL season, which works out to be 0.88 reviews per game.
But the fact that there are games which can feature multiple score review requests, a cap should be placed on each game, and, now that the technology is here to stay, the scourge of breaks in play should be spread out evenly across each match.
Outside of that, let goal umpires get back to what they do best, calling it as they see it, and signalling goal, point and out of bounds (on the full) decisions with poise and confidence, just as they did for over 100 years before the advent of the score review system.
Because just like their cricket counterparts, the goal umpires' confidence has quite clearly been shattered by the advent of technology, as they often second-guess themselves over the most blatantly obvious decisions.
Will they make the odd mistake without the ability to call for a review themselves? Sure. But the endless pursuit of perfection regularly stunts footy's continuous, free-flowing nature, with reviews that can last 20-30 seconds halting momentum and excitement in many instances.
And while we're at it, make the goal umpires wear long white coats and white broad-brimmed hats again just like the good old days. OK, maybe that's wishful thinking.
But another welcome by-product of leaving the power of reviewing scores solely with competing teams, and capping the number of reviews, would be an additional layer of drama added to an already action-packed sport.
Social media and talkback radio would go into overdrive if a team foolishly blew its chances on silly reviews, only for them to be unable to review an opposition goal in the dying stages which was clearly touched, but given the all-clear, before losing by less than a kick. It would make for compelling viewing, and the losing team would only have themselves to blame.
Hopefully the successors of outgoing CEO Gillon McLachlan and football operations boss Brad Scott have been paying close attention to the T20 World Cup, because capped reviews for each team is just what the AFL needs.
