Luke Hodge lifts lid on sad situation with Cyril Rioli

Yahoo

06-05-2025

Hawthorn premiership teammates haven't spoken for some time. Source: 7AFL
Video transcript
Obviously no Cyril Rioli, who was in Melbourne watching his nephew I think play footy at Scotch College.
Uh, you know, is it, is it sad is sad he didn't come, would you?
Yeah, um, of course, Bud wasn't there as well.
Bud was in, in Perth, uh, he had other reasons.
Clarker came along and Cyril, Cyril wasn't there, which I said, when you, when you go through, um, so much with, with a lot of guys, you wanna see all their faces, um, and we understand that that Hawthorn and Cyril haven't come to, I guess the stage where Cyril feels comfortable back into the football club just yet, but you can only, as they say, time heals all wounds and we're just hoping that that gets to a Cyril.
Um, I, I haven't been able to speak to Cyril.
Um, I think there's been a lot of guys, when we went to Darwin, you've I've reached out, yeah, I went to Darwin 2021, 22 for filming, uh, tried to call him, got his old number, got his new number off Hilly, um, tried to call, didn't get anything back from him.
So there's been a number of guys that have reached out to Cyril.
Um, and, and we left on really good terms, like, so when I've got messages from Cyril when his old man was crook just saying families before football, go, go and spend time with your family, and then when he retired, he sent me a message, thanks for all the development and all the help.
So we've had no, I've had no issues with Cyril ever, but when he sort of ran into this with Hawthorn, it sort of, he's almost like he's parted ways with everyone there cos I know there's there's very few blokes, even a lot of the mentors that he spent a lot of time with in that forward line, haven't been able to connect with him either.