“I am a fan of playing everyone twice – 34 rounds. You would have to shorten the games but I like that idea. I know some people want to go the other way and cut back to 17 round and play but the more games the better as far as I am concerned.
“Then do you have a relegation system as well? It’s hard to think about logistic wise but you don’t want to have teams that can’t win it playing for so long so maybe
“It’d be terrible feeling to be relegated but it would be a great spectacle to watch,” he said.
Geelong Brownlow medallist Dangerfield said recently he liked the idea of creating greater equity in the fixture and said while one way to do that is to make a 17 round season he doubted many players would favour also cutting their salaries by 20 percent to account for the drop in games.
“I think 17 games make sense purely because it’s fair. The other alternative is what if you play 34 games, but instead of 120 minutes of footy, you cut it to 18 minute quarters, so you’re playing less than 80 minutes of footy,” Dangerfield said on SEN radio recently.
“I think I’ve worked it out. It’s a bit over five games extra you’d play a season, but you might not play as many games as it might be spread out differently and then publicly the revenue it would create would jump significantly because it’d be more games played.”
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Fremantle captain Nat Fyfe answered the same question by immediately talking of the impact of travel for them.
Fyfe said he would buy a jet and give it to the Dockers and Eagles because of how much they fly.
Bombers captain Dyson Heppell said if put I charge he too would favour changing the season structure with no pre-season competition and pre-season training only beginning for any club in mid-January.
“I would like to see a shorter game and a longer season so if we are scrapping our pre-season we can extend our season,” Heppell said.
“Thirty is probably a bit of carry on I reckon, I might not have 34 in me but I reckon 26 or 27 and finals.”
Carlton captain Marc Murphy found common ground with Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett and said he'd prefer to put more into grass roots fotball than worrying about expanding into new markets overseas.
Other captains like Tom Lynch from the Suns favoured no tinkering with the rules (though Lynch admitted he was quite happy with hte chopping of the arms rule, but hated the subs vest).
Jack Viney was happy to scrap one recent rule change and bring back the sling tackle. He admitted he’d be less likely to be suspended with that change.
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Michael Gleeson is a senior AFL football writer and Fairfax Media's athletics writer. He also covers tennis, cricket and other sports. He won the AFL Players Association Grant Hattam Trophy for excellence in journalism for the second time in 2014 and was a finalist in the 2014 Quill Awards for best sports feature writer. He was also a finalist in the 2014 Australian Sports Commission awards for his work on ‘Boots for Kids’. He is a winner of the AFL Media Association award for best news reporter and a two-time winner of Cricket Victoria’s cricket writer of the year award. Michael has covered multiple Olympics, Commonwealth Games and world championships and 15 seasons of AFL, He has also written seven books – five sports books and two true crime books.
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