Geelong coach Chris Scott says he’s removed from the decision-making around Tyson Stengle and “can’t shed any light” on why the small forward didn’t play in the VFL match against Southport earlier this month
The Cats gave “illness” as the reason for the 27-year-old’s absence from the team for the June 19 match when the team was released the day before.
However, Channel Seven reported last week that Stengle missed the flight to the Gold Coast and was spotted at a Melbourne nightclub earlier that week.
“I’ll just repeat what. I’ve said before: we are by design, as a coaching group, removed from that decision-making to a very large extent,” Scott said.
“It’s a bit like the injury status. We get communicated with the few days before a game around availability, and this one’s not much different.
“So that is a different situation in that sometimes you can question a little bit more as a coach. But this one, I suspect, if I asked, I wouldn’t even get the answer.
“So again, I think it fits in the category of ‘I understand why you’re interested.’ I’m interested as well.
“But I can’t shed any light on it. I suspect there are other people that can, but it’s just not me.”
Stengle was absent from the club for periods of the pre-season and the first half of the home-and-away season, with reports he was in the AFL’s medical model, with the league determining his ability to play.
He made a successful return to the field in a VFL match against the Gold Coast on June 13, where he kicked four goals from 15 disposals, giving rise to an AFL return in the latter part of the season.
However, that now appears to be a pipedream.
“You shouldn’t mistake the real priority that we place on player welfare for forgetting that we’re also in a high-performance industry where we have high expectations of our players and our people, so that we can perform as well as possible,” Scott said.
“Now he’s been miles off sof being available for AFL selection.
“So it sort of hasn’t crossed my desk, and I suspect it really won’t until that becomes a bit more of a viable situation.
“But we’re just, we’re not there yet.”
Stengle, who Geelong picked off the football scrapheap at the end of 2021 after being sacked by Adelaide over off-field issues, is in the second season of a five-year contract.
“I’ve got so much admiration for the players that can just persevere through the ups and downs as well as they do,” Scott said
“It is a bit of a surprise to me that I have more players just saying, ‘Look, I’m finding this too tough at the moment.’
“Which again, if we circle all the way back to where we started, that’s why we do sort of take the view that getting comfortable being uncomfortable is one way to go about it; we just don’t think about it that way.
“We’d like to make things as easy as possible when we possibly can, because, let’s be honest, most of the time it’s going to be bloody hard work.
“And my take on where Tyson’s at is that’s how he’s feeling about his sort of football life at the moment. It’s just all a little bit hard for him.
“And so there is a limit to our support with that because we’re like, ‘Hey man, we empathise with you. This is a tough game’.
“But there are limits to where our empathy takes us because we’re not a charity as much as we’d like to be.”
X: @krockfootball
