Member of young Saint's management caught out criticising Lyon on social media

A member of young Saint Mattaes Phillipou’s management team has been caught out criticising Ross Lyon in a now-deleted post on Twitter (X) as St Kilda’s on-field problems grow.  

After a six-point loss to Hawthorn on Saturday that left the Saints only percentage above the bottom four, Ned Costello – a director at Sports Minded, which looks after Phillipou – took to X the following day.

“@davidking34 tell me who in the forward line has improved under Lyon? (Mitch) Owens, (Max) King, phillipou have gotten considerably worse under Lyon. When they came in young and just played they looked exciting. He is destroying them,” Costello posted on early Sunday afternoon. 

The post was deleted shortly after and Costello’s X account no longer exists.

SEN regular and Nine’s Tom Morris has since revealed more details.

“I’ve just spoken to his manager… he said it was an emotional response from the couch and (he) has no knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes and it is an error,” Morris told Nine’s Footy Furnace late on Sunday.

Morris also posted on X that Costello regrets the tweet.

Costello’s post came after Phillipou was earlier last week dropped for the first time in his career after averaging just over eight touches across his past three AFL games.

The 19-year-old top 10 draft pick now has 32 games of AFL experience to his name, yet his numbers have dipped slightly from last season.

Phillipou played VFL for the first time in his career on Sunday and gathered 20 possessions, five clearances and laid eight tackles in a last-gasp five-point loss to Box Hill.

St Kilda’s AFL side was expected to feature in finals again after impressing in Lyon’s first year but has taken a step backwards on the evidence through nine rounds of 2024.

Lyon’s men have lost four of their last five games, have only recorded three wins for the entire season and have two tough challenges upcoming in Fremantle and Melbourne.