"We've got to look at our game and say: 'Soccer is 90 minutes, rugby is 80 minutes, is there somewhere in between where we can get our game to about 90 minutes all up'? "I'm not saying that it should be like T20 football, but we've got to reduce the length so that people can go to a game, but still do something on either end of it. Or on Saturday afternoons with their kids, they can go and have lunch, go to the game, but still get home and watch a movie." In 1994, the AFL reduced quarters from 25 minutes to 20, but changed the definition of time-on to incorporate more added time for stoppages. The unintended consequence was to actually lengthen games, with average game times reaching nearly 124 minutes in 2011. There have been several instances since then of quarters running longer than 40 minutes, with more added time than official time. In 2011 a game between Brisbane and Gold Coast stretched to 138 minutes. Malthouse said that in terms of time consumed, AFL football had not changed substantially for 50 years and no longer reflected the demand of a modern society, which tried to do more with less time to spend.

"What does today's public want? Today's public are not what they were in the 1950s and '60s when football was get there, watch the under 19s, watch the reserves, watch the seniors, go home exhausted on Saturday night then sit up on Sunday and watch 'World Of Sport'. That's gone. "What people now want is to say 'I'm going to Southbank at 6pm, I'll have a beer or wine, go to the football, then I want to come back and go out for a late dinner'." Malthouse said while it was crucial to preserve the "uniqueness" of our football code, time could be saved by trimming the fat he said existed with the method of adding time-on and by reducing the half-time break. "A lot of the time-on is irrelevant to the way we do it," he said. "The ball is going to go out of bounds. Let's just keep going. If it goes over the fence and someone holds it, then you stop the clock." The three-time premiership coach, now entering his 31st year of senior coaching at his fourth club, said his perspective on the half-time break was very different as a spectator to when he was actively involved in a game.

"That 20 minutes at half-time, I can't tell you how quickly that goes as a coach. But I've sat in the stands watching those 20 minutes and just thought: 'Jeez, come on, get back down the race for Christ's sake. "If they cut it to 15 minutes, we'll adjust to 15." Malthouse said the problem of increasing congestion in the modern game could be countered by legislation to keep a minimum number of players away from the contest. "Perhaps there are too many people around the ball," he said. "Perhaps you keep at least four pairs of players 40 metres from the ball, so you have a little bit of dilution in the middle of the ground. "We don't want to be going back to the early years, but we need to keep the uniqueness of our game, which is running and bouncing and the big mark and that sort of stuff. And the thing is there are ways of doing it without complicating the game.

"You can't tell a coach to do that because we're going to be coaching to win, but you can tell the coaches that you've got to leave at least four blokes on your side 40 metres away. We've got that many umpires out there they can stand 40 metres away from a contest. You step in front of them, it's offside, bad luck, a free kick. "So, therefore, the game becomes a little bit more dynamic instead of a maul, because if you're big and strong and tough enough, you can keep the ball going, hit the right targets, then off you go."