Geelong coach Chris Scott has publicly hit absent and embattled premiership forward Tyson Stengle between the eyes with a dose of honesty.
The Cats have fiercely supported Stengle through his ongoing off-field personal troubles, particularly in the past nine months since last year’s grand final — but there is a “limit” to the empathy they can show, Scott says.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Chris Scott says patience running out with Tyson Stengle
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Stengle has not been seen at AFL level since the 2025 decider against Brisbane, and has played just one VFL game this season.
7NEWS Melbourne’s Xander McGuire revealed last week that Stengle he had been seen at a Melbourne nightclub in the days before what would have been his second VFL clash on June 20.
He missed the flight and was omitted from the VFL team that faced Southport, with the club citing illness as the reason.
The flag-winning goalsneak’s situation remains clouded with Scott and Cats intimating it’s an AFL issue, while the league says it’s largely a matter for Geelong.
Scott says Stengle remains “miles off” being available.
“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,” Scott told reporters on Monday.
“We’re not there yet.”
Scott was expansive and brutally honest in his assessment of Stengle’s current situation, which remains largely unknown to the public.
“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 you don’t have more players just saying: ‘Look, I’m finding this too tough at the moment’.
“We’d like to make things as easy as 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.”
But he added there were limits to the support the Cats could offer.
“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’,” the two-time premiership coach said.
“But there are limits to where our empathy takes us because we’re not a charity, as much as we’d like to be.”
Asked if Stengle’s scenario was an AFL or club matter, Scott replied: “It’s not me … there are probably other people that you should put that question to.
“Our role in these situations, we talk a lot about really supporting players.
“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.”
With AAP
