To the baying masses, numbers around the ball are a blight. Yet in how this defence-driven evolution has forced players to sharpen already acute skills in order to conjure a way "out", beauty lurks.

A colleague calls it "kung-fu handball", the rapid-fire delivery of a series of short, sharp passes made by players who are invariably in the process of being tackled. They might have raised their arms free of the tackler, or simply found a way through strength or sublety to get the ball to a nearby teammate.

The recipient is usually under similar duress, and it is often not until the process has been repeated several times – the Sherrin pinballing around the maelstrom so fast it demands a slo-mo second viewing – that it reaches a free man in clear air. Only then does his team inhale the oxygen of an uncontested possession heading into an open forward half.

"People see the really good examples and it sticks in their mind," one club's midfield coach says, adding that it comes with the territory that the unsuccessful passages – when the release goes wrong and the ball is coughed up – tend to stay with him more.

"But there's art to it: clean hands, dealing with the contest, standing up in the tackle. There's beauty in that."

Greg Williams was a stoppage king of a different football age, when nirvana was Justin Madden palming a ball into his lap and "Diesel" cleared a path with a sublime sweep of left or right fist over opposite palm.

He notes how different this part of the game was then, when Terry Wallace was the competition's premier centreman racking up 500 kicks in a season – many of them a means of clearing a stoppage.

"There are so many better handballers now than when I played," Williams says. "At stoppages blokes were doing quick kicks, but they worked out the danger of handball.

"Creating the loose man has always been the key to the game. If you got it out to Craig Bradley running towards 'Sticks' (Carlton captain Stephen Kernahan), it was all over."

Williams appreciates the pressure and tackling, which has more than doubled in number since 2000, but is an advocate for legislation to spread players around the ground. At times he sees such heavy congestion, he says, "Jesus Christ couldn't get it out." Underscoring how incredible it can be when a team does.

"There are so many players who are so good at getting the one-metre handball off, then another one, another one, another one, and they're out."

As someone who spent 297 games in and around stoppages for Richmond, Wayne Campbell also has an appreciation of the brilliance at play here; the blink-of-an-eye decision-making, the athletic ability to absorb the tackle and execute a difficult skill in asphyxiating surrounds.

As the AFL's national umpiring director, he also sees the headache such artistry can create.

"It's certainly the umpires' view that that's the hardest part of the game now," Campbell says, "It all happens so quickly. The ball getting hit to the player comes quick, the tackle comes quick. They've got to work out is the tackle legal? Has he had prior opportunity? Did he dispose of it properly?

"And then they put it on to someone else, and you go through the exact same process again."

That midfield coach says "clean hands" means something entirely different now to 20 years ago, given the speed and pressure in these intimate exchanges.

He talks of "stoppage craft", the many facets that have made this phase of the game much more scientific than the get-it-and-kick-it days of yore. If your stoppage craft is strong – like Hawthorn's – you have a head-start in the game.

Typically, the area around the stoppage is likened to a clock face with a potential exit point at every number. "If the opposition want to take some numbers away, then a good stoppage team will exploit the numbers they haven't covered," he says.

Depending on game situation, players can opt to hold the ball in and push for a secondary stoppage (also on the up in recent years), but when it's time to target a release they're drilled to keep their feet ("because once you go to ground you're a number down"), free their arms and get it off.

Even with arms pinned, he says there are "ways to release that pressure a little bit" to still get the handball out. Movement – ensuring you're not "a sitting duck, just standing still" – is key.

Williams cites technique, and reckons a lack of leg speed actually helped him there. "There's a way to kick and handball better, and there's a way to take the ball better too, to take it low."

Jobe Watson credits Williams with improving his stoppage work, and he also worked with fellow Brownlow medallist Chris Judd when he moved home from West Coast.

"I trained Juddy when he first got to Carlton, told him 'you've gotta practice for when you're not fast, because you'll slow down eventually'," Williams says.

"He was faster than anyone, and he couldn't get it out in the end, because there are just too many blokes around the ball."

As late as the on-ground warm-up minutes before a game's first bounce, players don bibs and run through contested drills – albeit at low intensity – to prepare for the ball-ups and boundary throw-ins of the coming hours.

Perhaps surprisingly, the midfield coach says the focus on "total football" means training specific to prising the ball clear of stoppages happens less than you'd think. "We don't spend much time on it at all."

Which just makes you wonder how much better "kung-fu handball" could become.