Five-time Hawthorn premiership player Dermott Brereton says he doesn’t love the game that he has dedicated his whole life to anymore.
Brereton believes the way AFL is being played now is unenjoyable to watch because of player congestion on the ball.
“I love Australian Rules Football, but I don’t love the game now,” Brereton told SEN’s Time On.
"I watch it and appreciate how good they are for what they do but I don’t love it as a spectacle anymore.
"I appreciate their value and their supply, but I don’t love it anymore.”
The Hawthorn legend says coaches are over-complicating the game and players are becoming robotic.
“We would write up on the board to have ten tackles per quarter and we never lost a game,” he said.
“If you get 40 now you are a low pressure team and that is because you need saturation of numbers around the ball. That’s just the nature of the game now. That’s the style we have.
“That’s because we have all the philosophies and all the game styles and all the planning.
“All these elements of the game that the coaching panels put in at each club because their jobs are at the footy club 60 hours a week to make their team win.
“We used to have players who would nut it out for themselves.
“If you took this current game style and immediately swapped it to the 80’s or 90’s style of football where you barely got rotated we would wipe the floor with them.”
While the AFL has already tried to tackle this issue in the game by lowering the number of rotations, Brereton believes it should be lowered even further.
