CHANGES made to the AFL’s interchange procedures have received a tick of approval from the Sydney Swans whose extra player on the field in the dying minutes of the round six clash against North Melbourne initially sparked the review.

The club was fined $50,000, half of which was suspended, after ruckman Jesse White ran onto the field while Darren Jolly – the man he was meant to replace - remained in play during the dramatic climax of the drawn game.

Sydney’s football operations manager Andrew Ireland is confident the changes, that will be implemented from round nine, will make a repeat of such a situation highly improbable. 

“There’s no doubt that the changes bring the rules up to date or closer to the type of rules that are required for the modern game,” Ireland said.

“When you looked at the fact that captains had to call for head counts and things like that previously; those rules were probably in place since the [game] started.

“In our case it would now mean that the player would not be close enough to the interchange area to think he was due to go on; it’s a fair bit more structured and I think the holding area becomes a safety net for the clubs.

“It’s set back from the boundary line and the fact that a player’s got to actually cross the boundary line before a free is paid. Clearly if the wrong player starts to go well you’ve got the capacity to remedy that.”

The new procedures will see an extra steward in place to monitor interchanges with players required to enter and depart from the designated holding area in front of their team’s bench and behind the boundary line before actually entering the field of play.

Although he expected the new procedures to slow down the interchange process, Ireland felt the impact on the total number of interchanges made per game would be minimal.

“If clubs have come to the conclusion that they need to bring players off, then the fact that a player goes on to the ground a second or two later than they might’ve previously, I don’t think it will make much of an impact,” he said, adding the Swans will hold an extra session to drill their players on the changes on Friday.

“I think it’s going to be something new for the players and obviously with the amount of rotations and the fact that a lot of players have the capacity to come off themselves rather than be instructed to come off there will need to be adjustments made.”

Any club found breaking the rules will incur a free kick and a 50 m penalty from the centre of the ground depending on where the ball is at the time of the breach which Ireland felt was an appropriate sanction.

“I guess the only question we’d probably raise is the fact that the grounds are different sizes,” he said.

“If you got a free kick and a 50m penalty from the middle of Subiaco you’re probably still going to be 40m away from goal whereas at some other ground you might be 20m out.

“Maybe there needs to be some consideration of having exactly the same spot within the 50m arc on each ground designated so that the size of the ground doesn’t matter.”

The AFL will investigate the merits of having a camera trained on the interchange area throughout matches in future, but Ireland believed the recent changes would allow for adequate policing of the rules.