It must be tough playing a gig after the Foo Fighters.

Fourteen hours after the American rock band walked off the ANZ Stadium stage, the Accidental Leaders performed for the first time together.

Luke Foley was pushed into the Labor leadership only seven weeks ago and there he was going up against Mike Baird in the a head-to-head debate hosted by the NSW Business Chamber on Friday.

The audition carried risks for both.

Baird had the position, power, privilege and more to lose if bested by the parvenu.

Foley had a receding hairline, the tragic history of NSW Labor and a low recognition factor to overcome.

But Foley could joke about his invisibility.

"I was down at the Flemington markets last Saturday and a bloke approached and said 'I know who you are'," Foley said.

"I said, 'who am I? And he said, 'I don't know but you're him'. So my recognition is picking up."

The pair sleepwalked through opening speeches and the first questions.

But the third question, asking how Baird would fund election promises if the Coalition failed to sell the wires and poles, elicited the response that there was "no plan B".

Confession or threat? It did not matter. The Premier had opened a fissure and Foley gushed in saying if  the government could not sell the NSW electricity network, "all the promises mean nothing".

Baird was asked twice about the federal Liberal turmoil and treated Tony Abbott as some sort of Banquo's ghost.

The second question sought the Premier's opinion on the relative strengths of the Prime Minister and Malcolm Turnbull but he preferred not to comment.

"Would you like me to?" Foley offered helpfully.

But Abbott gate-crashed anyway: In the live video stream an image of Abbott loomed at Baird's shoulder. The Prime Minister was being confronted by a man wielding a club. It was not Turnbull but a Maori dancer.