THE AFL decided on Sunday that it was time everyone simply acknowledged it and accepted the obvious: the interchange rules had been changed for the better.

Doubtless, the league would like to think so. Except it is neither obvious nor true.

At the weekend, the first free kick and 50-metre penalty issued under this new system was meted out in the West Coast-Adelaide match. It was wrong. The AFL accepts as much and has dropped the official for the next match, but won't accept that this hints the new system is no improvement at all.

The steward thought he saw something he didn't, the emergency umpire was sent scuttling from the bench and suddenly Adelaide was gifted a goal. It was a one-sided contest but it might just as easily have occurred in the Western Bulldogs-North Melbourne game. Would the AFL have been as effusive then?

In the game that brought all this change about, a 19th man ran freely about the field for more than a minute in what would be a drawn game. The emergency umpire on the boundary at the time was aware of the situation and was powerless to do anything.

This was patently absurd. An emergency umpire empowered to run about warning grappling players to stop being nasty to one another could not intervene when the integrity of the match was in question.

The league had to act, but not in the manner it did, and certainly not when it did, mid-season.

The suggestion that because a form of post-it note annotation was always used and that the latest rule change was only a refinement of that system misses the point. The system was being changed, the only concern was making it better. Who cares if they had always written numbers down?

There is only one salient point of concern here before the next silly step of bar codes on jumpers and scanners on boundary lines is contemplated and it is this: each team can only have 18 players on the ground at any one time. It does not matter which 18 they are. Nor, unless you are the coach, does it matter who is on your bench.

All that was needed was one AFL steward per team to be on the bench with the charge of keeping track of how many players that team had on the field at any time and intervening with a free kick if it had too many. It is not that hard.

A competition that is concerned with image and aesthetics was seemingly not concerned with the sight of a backlog of players queueing up at the bench waiting for the green light to exit the ground. AFL football operations manager Adrian Anderson's comment that the new system was superior would suggest that the league liked the look.

Or perhaps not. Maybe the league also thought the logjam at the bench ugly and was not troubled by an errant free kick and goal here and there because it found far more appealing the deterrent effect the new system might have on those it believed overused the bench.

The AFL trialled capping the number of interchanges in the pre-season because it disliked the idea of high rotations. The move was met with scorn by the clubs. Under the guise of preserving the integrity of the game, it is seeking a back-door means on the clubs' use of the bench to achieve the same end.