The Western Bulldogs will play Sydney in an AFLW elimination final at Henson Park on Sunday, their first appearance in the finals since 2022.
They finished the home-and-away season with eight wins from twelve games, seventh on the ladder. It is a sharp break from recent form: the club finished last in 2023 and twelfth in each of 2024 and 2025.
Tamara Hyett was appointed coach after a program review that followed the 2023 season.
Among this year's results was a 26-point win over Gold Coast, a fellow finals side. In round four, Emma McDonald kicked three goals in the final quarter against Sydney to end the Swans' unbeaten start to the season.
"She went on a rampage to kick her three goals and to get us up and about," said Elaine Grigg, who joined the club as a high-profile draftee in 2023 and works outside football as a student support officer at a school.
Grigg puts the turnaround down to the group rather than any single change. "The connections that we have with everyone, it actually helps on the footy field," she said.
One addition to the week is a mascot. "This year, we've had a little mascot. Its name is Sawya, and it's a pet giraffe," Grigg said. Each week the squad spins a wheel to pick the player who takes Sawya home. That player has to make a video of what they did with it and present the video at the Monday player meeting. Grigg said the exercise had revealed a creative side to the goalsneak Sarah Hartwig, including sewing and baking, and named Ellie Blackburn as the main instigator of the team's pre-game dance.
The club's own account identifies several things that changed. A review. A coach. A settled group. This newspaper is interested in the one that can be isolated.
A coach is a constant and cannot be withheld from a player to see what happens. A review occurred once, in 2023, and was followed immediately by two twelfth-place finishes. The giraffe is the only variable in the system that is reassigned weekly, at random, by a wheel, and whose distribution can therefore be tracked player by player across a full season.
The record so far is not ambiguous. Sawya has been present for one season. In that season the Bulldogs have won eight of twelve matches and qualified for the finals. In every season without Sawya since 2022 they have not. The sample is small; the result is clean.
Our analysts would like sight of the data the club already holds and may not realise it holds. A video exists for every week of the season, filed and presented at the Monday meeting. Somewhere in that archive is the week the giraffe went to the wrong house.
There are selection questions to settle before Sunday. The wheel allocates Sawya without reference to form, which is defensible across a long home-and-away season and much harder to justify in a knockout match. A club that rotates its most productive asset at random on the eve of an elimination final is taking a position on luck, and it is not the cautious one.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has examined the full record and identified the single gap in it, which it regards as decisive. The Western Bulldogs have never played a final with the giraffe. The giraffe has never played a final either.