The AFL's head of women's football Nicole Livingstone had said on the same program she would take the question on notice but Hocking jumped in to say the door should not be closed on that prospect. "I'm happy to answer that, I just think that a lot of what we've touched on here is just tradition," Hocking said. "There's a whole range of things that we're unpacking that have just been the way they've been because of 160 years of football. "I think that's OK. "I don't think we need to necessarily need to be looking over the fence at one another and saying whether we need to add another initial to something.

"If in time that's something that emerges, we are all ears at the AFL." The VFL was renamed the AFL in 1990 to reflect the introduction of teams from Western Australia and Queensland in 1987. Cricket Australia has changed its naming conventions to label its men's and women's national teams in the same way, and Australian captain Meg Lanning said at a recent Future Women breakfast in Melbourne that cricket had recognised the importance of the issue. "We have made a bit of a shift in cricket. We are referred to as the Australian Women's team and also the Australian Men's team, that has come in as well. We noticed that a few years ago that the language is actually really important in terms of how you refer to teams in sport. We are getting there but there's certainly a bit more room to move there," Lanning said.