Proposed new ideas are always "radical", don't you find? No-one ever seems to release a series of "modest" or "mildly useful" ideas, even though there may be a genuine need for them. I guess, if you're a think-tank, you have to make tracks.

One of these proposals, which will be discussed at various meetings due to take place in the next nine months, involves shortening matches to 30 minutes per half to allow more "effective playing time".

In its document, the IFAB outlines how there is less than 60 minutes of actual playing time in the sport due to time-wasting and other stoppages.

The move would see the referee stop the clock every time the ball goes out of play, reducing the overall match time to 60 minutes from 90.

So firstly, "other stoppages"? Could this mean goals? They hold up play all the time. Everyone starts charging about being happy; sometimes the side that's conceded starts charging about being unhappy. Timewise, it’s a shocker.

If not that, then what? Free-kicks? They stop the flow - and why? For the sole reason of penalising sides for fouling and breaking the rules. It's all a bit Victorian, isn't it? All very Old Carthusian. But still, I suppose this hold-up will have to stay for now.

Presumably any new ruling would not prevent the ball going out of play. So where exactly is the gain? Everything would still take as long as it always has done. It's just that if you scored in the last minute, it would be the 60th rather than the 90th. How is stopping the clock again and again and again going to improve the game?

Granted, this idea might eradicate one method teams employ to waste time, namely kicking the ball out of play. But that leaves a whole world of time-wasting potentiality intact.

Down the years, the unofficial corpus of best practice on the subject of time-wasting has been adapted and handed on from team to team in the manner of an Olympic Knowledge Transfer.

So many subtle skills exist in our game, which are sometimes unnoticed or unappreciated.

Almost but not quite throwing the ball to the referee or opposition. Throwing the ball just too hard to the referee or the opposition, so it goes over their heads or behind them. Developing to a very high degree the art of selective deafness. Or going ahead with a free kick when the whistle hasn't been blown.

Selective blindness. "Sorry ref, didn't see him/the flag up/you there."

A toddler-like inability to understand or heed basic commands, adopted at key points of the match, with free-kicks being a favourite time of operation. Taking the ball towards the touchline or corners, asking the opponents to run the risk of fouling or conceding a corner in their impatience.

Then there is the range of body language - from the graceful dive to the hurt assumption of innocence after what might have seemed an illegal challenge. 

We're talking about a whole living culture here. But is it all bad?

On the subject of the new proposals, the IFAB's technical director, David Elleray, has commented: "You could say that it is a quiet revolution aimed at getting football even better".

Nobody will argue against making football even better. But what is the essential premise of this 60 minutes proposal? Good equals 100 per cent action. Football has to completely fill the frame.

It could prove an influential trendsetter.

I don't think we have to look too far or too hard in our major galleries to find some scandalous wastes of space. Fair play to Van Gogh the Dutchman - total art, canvas completely covered. But Picasso - gaps everywhere. So many big missed opportunities…

The same goes when one considers music - again, gaps, pauses, all over the shop. Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler - all guilty of symphonic time-wasting.

Obviously this would take a bit of looking into. Who could put a figure on the wastage here? 

I mean, off the top of my head, I reckon Beethoven has often got 15 to 20 per cent spare capacity. And Picasso - I'd say his painting coverage conversion rate was often at levels lower than 50 per cent.

But look - let’s not be too critical. After all, there is nothing here to rival that previous idea that did the rounds, like a hideous virus, in international footballing talking shops. 

You know the one - make the goals bigger. First stop on the simplistic branch line that has let's play with two balls at its terminus.