It was an audacious bid by a man who had, just four years earlier, provided gloomy election-night commentary on NSW Labor's thumping defeat.
Luke Foley, 44, had a mere eight weeks' experience as leader of the parliamentary Labor Party when he channelled Australian fast bowler Fred "The Demon" Spofforth and declared of a state election victory by his party: "This thing can be done."
The former union boss and senior ALP official took over the leadership reins from John Robertson on January 5, less than three months before the poll, and had never before faced an election.
Foley has always been a politician in need of an election campaign - he had regularly upstaged Robertson with his instinctive talent for reducing policy to media soundbites and his predilection for staging press conferences with koalas and other cuddly animals - but this was a challenge of a different order.
A seasoned political operator in the party's Sussex Street headquarters, the left-wing Foley was installed in the upper house in 2010 after the resignation of ICAC frequent flyer Ian Macdonald. Now he has battled to raise his profile and win the lower house seat of Auburn while convincing voters across the state to switch their allegiance from the Coalition led by Mike Baird, the most popular leader in Australia.
Labor historian Rodney Cavalier, a former minister in the Wran and Unsworth governments, said Foley was a "natural leader" and had campaigned "brilliantly".
"He's lifted us from nothing to barely credible," said Cavalier, who became firm friends with Foley "through a shared passion for cricket". The former SCG Trust chairman said Labor had been "sailing towards a huge defeat" with Robertson at the helm.
As the ALP's campaign spokesman in 2011, the straight-talking Foley had delivered the news to ABC viewers: "The heartland's gone. We'll have some sticks of furniture left, but the seats we hold probably won't have a majority of 10 per cent.
"Seats we've never ever lost, we'll lose tonight."
In the days after the bloodbath, which reduced Labor to a battle-scarred rump of 20 MPs in the 93-seat lower house, Foley counselled against a "quick fix".
Peter Chen, a political science lecturer at the University of Sydney, said "New South Welshmen have not yet fully ventilated themselves with regards to their disgust about the Labor Party" over revelations about Eddie Obeid and others which were aired at the Independent Commission Against Corruption after the 2011 poll.
But he said Foley's low profile was not fatal to his campaign, noting the now Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews "had incredibly low levels of voter recognition" before his election win.
Foley proved his electioneering mettle in his first days on the trail. He was quick to capitalise on missteps by Baird in the first leaders' debate of the election, in which the Liberal leader admitted he had "no plan B" for funding promises if he failed to push his electricity privatisation plan through Parliament.
Former premier Bob Carr, who had his own bid for an electricity sell-off knocked back by the ALP in 1997, said "there has been a great shot of enthusiasm through the Labor camp as a result of his campaigning".
"He hasn't committed a single mistake, and that's a good achievement for someone with only weeks' experience in the leadership," Carr said.
"The Baird case for electricity privatisation unravelled badly during the campaign. Ordinary voters were talking about it as a bad deal."
The partial privatisation of the poles and wires was the defining issue of the election. Foley has a long opposed the sale of the assets - as assistant general secretary of the NSW ALP, he had a hand in the demise of premier Morris Iemma over a planned sell-off - although he insists he is not an "ideologue" and supports the sale of some state-owned assets.
Iemma, displaying no trace of a grudge, said Foley had campaigned "exceptionally well".
"He's energised Labor and given [the party] hope when there was lethargy and apprehension three or four months ago. He's decided on what he wants to say and how he wants to say it and he's stuck to that doggedly. He's communicated that very, very well."
He said the Baird government's privatisation policy was "not the one that I had fashioned, it's very different" and Foley was, in any case, "well entitled to take the position that he's taken".
But Foley would be roundly criticised during the election by some ALP heavyweights, including former federal Labor resources minister Martin Ferguson, for running a scare campaign about the mooted asset sale.
Former treasurer Michael Costa, a vocal supporter of electricity privatisation, said the "dishonesty and distortions" in the campaign against the sale were "a very poor reflection on Labor".
The campaign clearly demonstrated the "structural problem" of the influence of the unions over ALP policy, which made it hard for the party to put forward "positive reforming policies à la Hawke and Keating".
"There's nothing but condemnation from me about the way that has been handled," Costa said.
"Having said that, Luke Foley is a true political operator - he came up through the party machine - and I think that Labor probably performed much better with him from a tactical and a grassroots [perspective] than they would have under the previous leader, John Robertson."
Cavalier said Foley, a committed Catholic and father of three children under eight, was "an honest and decent person in a party that's anything but", and "it would have been the most rank hypocrisy" for him to support the sale.
The issue of power privatisation clearly still divides Labor stalwarts but there is consensus about who will be the party's next premier in NSW. "Undoubtedly" Foley, pronounced Carr. A win in four years' time was "very much on the cards", Iemma said.
"When you rewind to election night 2011, Labor supporters were in a state of despair that it may be 16, 20 years before we see another Labor government," Iemma said.
"Fast forward four years and it's quite incredible to see that Labor's in a position to be competitive in the election and making the inroads that it's made."
