YOU knew as Joel Bowden cleverly soaked up the precious 28 seconds left on the clock on Saturday that we were going to be talking about it for some time afterwards.

And so we need to. While protracted debate on the odd quirk in games of football can be tedious, Bowden's two rushed behinds that assured Richmond of its win over Essendon raises some serious issues. The Tigers were six points up when it happened. Say there'd been three or so minutes left on the clock. The canny Tiger could theoretically have kicked to himself then walked back through the goals five times and taken 180-odd seconds off the clock. Smart tactics, certainly. A good look for the game? Absolutely not.

Already, the suggestions are flying thick and fast. You could legislate to prevent the player kicking-in from moving backwards. Outlaw altogether the capacity for him to play on. Start the time clock again only when a second player has touched the ball. Etc., etc.

Personally, I prefer the perhaps more dramatic route of implementing the NAB Cup rule of three points for a rushed behind. That, at least, would have limited Bowden to doing it once. It may also curtail the increasing willingness of defenders to concede behinds in general play.

Think how often now you see a backman up to 20 metres from goal handball or even kick a score for the opposition in order to "get out of jail" or merely just begin another set-play kick-out routine.

But something, surely, has to be done. Now it's happened in a tight game, and knowing not only the frequency of close finishes but the capacity of football to ape innovation, the chance of plenty of recurrences is more than scaremongering. If we're going to continue to talk about changes such as not paying marks for kicks backwards behind centre in an attempt to make it harder to "ice" the clock, this anomaly is even more pressing.

At least when defenders kick the ball around to each other, there's some sort of football skill being executed. What Bowden was able to do involved no one else, and nothing more than a tap from foot to hand before walking backwards a few steps.

In an on-going debate about the attractiveness of the game, the rushed behinds stood out like the sorest of thumbs.

Good luck to Bowden for having the brain to carry it out. And good luck to Richmond for hanging on to the match points, which they probably deserved anyway. But clever though it all was, it wasn't football. It wasn't even sport at all, for that matter.