Star young Saint Mattaes Phillipou will miss this Saturday night's clash with Geelong with the illness that ruled him out of the Round 22 win over Richmond.
Coach Ross Lyon shared the latest on the 19-year-old, revealing his struggle with a virus that hopefully doesn't end his season.
"Nah he's pretty crook, he won't play," the St Kilda coach shared.
"It's been disappointing for him and us and our fans because he was really exciting. He just got a virus, he will be fine, I've spoken to him a few times.
"We'll just take care of him, it's taken a fair bit out of him.
"Optimistically, we think he'll recover (in time for Round 24)."
The clash with Geelong will be a revisiting of last year's Round 23 meeting between these two at Marvel, where the Saints secured their September spot and ended Geelong's season in the process.
The Saints, sitting out of the final eight race, are merely looking to disrupt Geelong's top four hopes, and won't be testing out any grand experiments to do so.
"I don't want to be too cheeky here but I will be... if we experiment and lost by 20 goals... they (media) would terrorise us.
"We don't tend to muck around too much... if you muck around against serious football teams, you get hurt pretty quickly."
"If someone gave me the license and said... 'there'll be no scrutiny and the members won't care', well we'd probably muck around a little bit, but you feel the heat on this side."
One man you can't muck around against is Geelong perennial All-Australian defender Tom Stewart.
Questioned on how he'll handle Chris Scott's tactic of Stewart starting at the centre-bounce before floating back to defence, Lyon shared his thoughts.
"Just because they've done it a certain way doesn't mean they (won't) do it another way," he responded.
"If you put too much energy into one player, it becomes really challenging."
"He'll get the respect he deserves."
Speculation over Josh Battle's potential exit from the club was the final topic on the agenda, Lyon being asked how his intercepting defender's form has seemingly lifted toward the end of the season.
Answering comically, Lyon said that Battle "gets great coaching here."
"Great senior coach, great assistant coach. He's a great person. Look, he prepares really well, he's really focussed. And at the end of the day, he lives the mantra; the only thing that counts is action."
"We've got a strong relationship. I haven't even asked him (about free agency rumours)."
"Have I had dinner with him? Do we do all those things? We do it all the same, we treat everyone equally, build a really good environment and hopefully it falls our way."
