Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson has suggested the AFL should trial a drastic change like moving to 16 players per team on the field in order to open the game up and increase scoring.
The four-time premiership coach, who admits he was part of the initial group of coaches that moved the game in a more defensive direction, says that it’s on AFL HQ, not necessarily coaches, to make the game more attacking.
“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.
“AFL footy and a lot of clubs, no one plays one-on-one defence anymore, it’s all zones and that type of zoning and the connection between one another to defend has become very sophisticated to defend.
“The upshot of that is no bugger can score anymore.
“We need to pull some levers on the game.
“Some time ago there was a charter produced about the game, some things that we wanted to make sure stayed in our game and one of them was high marking and another was good field kicking and the skills of the game, the physicality around our tackling and obviously be aware of the danger of the bump, but I think we have done that pretty well as a competition.
“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.
“I’m an advocate for pulling a lever on the game that trials how we can score because one of the things we wanted to retain in our game was high scoring.
“In terms of the charter of the game, we don’t want to be like soccer. We want to be able to score.”
The AFLW competition has already moved to 16 players on field in order to ease congestion, and scoring has increased since the move was made.
However, it’s unclear whether that change has necessarily been the cause of that.
Clarkson believes that if the AFL doesn’t make a change of that nature, then the other option is to look at umpiring.
“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,” he 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.
“And say to ourselves 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.
“The excitement in the game now is who can break out of the bubble like a Brisbane and have it spit into space so Charlie Cameron can sprint in front of everyone else and get the footy and kick a scintillating goal. That’s about the only genuine excitement that we’re seeing at the game at the moment, which is unfortunate.
“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.”
When asked whether coaches could take it upon themselves to increase scoring and change the way they play, Clarkson said it was their job to win games of footy.
“Everyone’s trying to do that (play faster and more attacking) obviously we don’t want to open ourselves up that much and we’ll probably give it a go for two or three weeks and then if it’s going badly and our jobs are in a bit of jeopardy, we’ll retreat quickly and return to the old,” he said.
“This is part of the problem. Quite often we’ll go to some of these meetings and they’ll say ‘the coaches are buggering up the game’. We’re competitive beasts and we’re in the game to win on behalf of our clubs and our members, but there’s a lever that we need to pull in that sense, but there’s also a very strong commitment from the 18 coaches around the health of the game.
“It’s not going to take one coach … there’s no one that’s going to be a maverick like that and retain their status in the game as a coach if they just consistently lose.
“It needs to be something the competition mandates in my view.”
Listen to the full interview with Alastair Clarkson on SEN Breakfast below
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