The NAB Cup is, at its core, an experimental competition.

And with news on Friday that the AFL will introduce a Twenty20 style opening round to the pre-season competition, it can now be said of the NAB Cup that it is very experimental.

The league had to do something. Seventeen teams into four weeks of pre-season football won't go and the league had iron-clad agreements with each of its broadcasters that demanded a month-long knockout competition in the late summer, early autumn period.

Of course, the added twist is that Greater Western Sydney will be making a cameo appearance in the competition and we can already picture Kevin Sheedy working his magnetic board furiously to determine who will play where. Although at the same time, we're not sure how competitive a team of kids who played in the under 18s this year, topped up by a few New South Wales state league players, will be in this competition. Even against Richmond.

So the AFL has clearly taken a leaf out of the phenomenally popular Twenty20 playbook - which panders to those whose attention span is not much longer than the average video game - and gone for a shorter, glitzier, heavier scoring, bells and whistles version of the tried-and-tested format.

In keeping with the experimental nature of the pre-season, if this compact version of the game proves a success, rest assured it will appear in the 2012 fixture even more prominently until - as has happened with cricket - it might one day spawn a whole new separate competition, like the Rugby Sevens tournament which is played each year in Hong Kong.

(Here's how it will work in round one next year, for those who haven't caught up with the Gillon McLachlan (pictured, above) announcement: six three-team groups play the "lightning round'' in three matches, each of two 20-minute halves, at the same venue, one after the other. For example: Team A will play team B in game one. The winner will meet team C in game two immediately following and then the loser of game one plays team C in the third match.

The side that finishes on top of each of the six groups will move through to round two of the NAB Cup, with the best two of the rest - determined by win-loss, supergoals and percentage - making up the rest of the finals pool. After the opening week of Twenty20 footy, the competition will revert to standard AFL match conditions for the quarter, semi and grand finals.)

It will be a challenging logistical exercise for the AFL and the clubs to pull this off. With each group of three teams playing at the one ground, every venue will needs three sets of dressing rooms - you can imagine all sorts of intellectual property issues that would arise from teams sharing changing rooms.

And from a sports medicine perspective, the real challenge will be for the team that has the one-hour break between games. How do you keep the players fresh and hydrated in that time?

We at BPL still remember (pathetic, we know) the AFL's lightning premiership that kicked off the 1996 centenary season. All the matches were played at Waverley, but despite the mid-February timeslot, Melbourne was struck that weekend by unseasonal Arctic-type weather. With snow in the nearby hills, you can just imagine how inviting Waverley Park was, and the whole event was a major flop. Essendon beat the Brisbane Bears, by the way.

Because the whole thing is so experimental, and with the strong likelihood that this will be the last formal pre-season competition, we look forward to this 'different' opening to the season.

And we also think there is scope for the AFL to have a bit of fun, with the match-ups, so we'd envisage the groups for the opening weekend looking like this:

LOOK WHAT YOU MISSED OUT ON CONFERENCE

Brisbane, Gold Coast, North Melbourne

KEVIN SHEEDY CONFERENCE

Essendon, Richmond, Greater Western Sydney

ALBERT PARK LAKE CONFERENCE

Sydney, St Kilda, Melbourne

STEPHEN KERNAHAN CONFERENCE

Adelaide, Port Adelaide, Carlton

LANCE FRANKLIN CONFERENCE

West Coast, Fremantle, Hawthorn

THE PREMIERSHIP WINDOW CONFERENCE

Geelong, Western Bulldogs, Collingwood