It took only 20 minutes of watching the Essendon-St Kilda NAB Cup semi-final on Friday to have a nagging fear confirmed: the game is slowly choking itself to death.

The modern player is so fit, the modern coach's tactics so sophisticated, the emphasis so clearly on shutting down space, that the result is often a rolling maul where the ball is in lengthy dispute under a pack of eight or 10 players. 

An unhealthy portion of the game is played in these clusters, with another 10 players hovering around the periphery of the pack, waiting for the ball to finally be prised free.

A camera from behind the Essendon goals in the second quarter showed all 36 players in one half of the ground - well  less than a half, almost a third of the ground.

The result was as ugly as it was predictable. And it must have resonated with the law-makers and power-brokers at the AFL, who are already concerned that on-field congestion is eroding the game's skills.

It's no surprise St Kilda featured in the match because, under Ross Lyon, the Saints have taken and improved upon the Sydney Swans' defence-first-fancy-pants-stuff-later approach. And many of the truly turgid affairs in the past couple of years have featured the red, white and black - last year's round 6 game against the Western Bulldogs being the absolute standout.

Collingwood in 2010 took those strategies to another level again. So the most successful teams now are the ones who best close down the match, control its tempo and get most numbers to the contest.  

The logical conclusion of this trend doesn't bear contemplating. If the game is allowed to go unchecked, all those aspects of the code which we love to think of as still being commonplace - five-bounce runs, open spaces, one-on-one contests, high marking and pack marks - will go slowly the same way as ankle-high boots and the flat punt.   

Yes, Brendon Goddard took one of the great marks in the Grand Final but when did it happen? Not in the first half when the helter-skelter nature of the game is at its most frenetic but in the dying moments when players are so dog tired that space does eventually open up on the field, and defenders haven't moved en masse to clog up the goalsquare. 

In a strong news story in the Herald Sun earlier this month, reporter Mark Stevens revealed the AFL was so concerned about growing on-field congestion it floated the idea of trialling 16 players a team in this year's NAB Cup, an idea that - sadly - never came to pass.

But even the fact the league has identified the problem is significant. For it shows the law-makers are as concerned with the trends as the ticket-buying fans.

Stevens wrote: ''Disposal efficiency has dropped from 81.2 per cent in 2000 to 73.1 per cent last year - proof that the game is more scrappy than when Essendon stormed to a premiership 11 years ago.'' 

The person charged with studying the game's trends, and reporting back to AFL HQ, is Andrew McKay.

And McKay's no fool. A qualified vet who distinguished himself in 244 games for Carlton, and then several years on the AFL match review panel, the South Australian knows his beans. He's not the type given to outlandish statements, but it's clear he's concerned by the direction the game's heading.

Even at a recent coaching conference he attended, McKay said guest speakers from AFL level were espousing some of these malign modern tactics to officials in charge of clubs at community level. "Even at that level, they're getting told to close up space, defensive tactics, congest it when they (the opposition) have got the ball," McKay said.

The AFL deserves praise for at least getting the ball rolling on this, but they missed a golden chance to trial the 16-player teams in this current NAB Cup. Fearful of the backlash, the league squibbed it - preferring to experiment with the last-touch-out-of-bounds rule instead as a means of speeding up play. 

So that's 12 months wasted. Next year, let's give it a whirl and see what happens. It might work. It might prove that a better solution lies elsewhere. But for the 2012 NAB Cup - or whatever it's called, and in whatever guise - let's go retro, scrap the two wingmen and play VFA rules. What's to lose?