Think back to the 2022 qualifying final. On a Friday night in front of 78,377 at the MCG Sydney led Melbourne by 19 points halfway through the final quarter but all the momentum was with the Dees. And then in five seconds two miraculous things happened to ensure the Swans went through to the preliminary final.
Ben Brown kicked long into an open Melbourne forward line, where Charlie Spargo was clear 10m goalside of Dane Rampe, the last Sydney defender. As Rampe hustled back, hoping just to hold him up, Spargo handballed over the top to an unattended Jake Melksham 15m from goal.
Melksham double-grabbed it but had time. He steadied and kicked as Robbie Fox came from nowhere. He’d sprinted from the middle of the ground and smothered the ball off Melksham’s boot. Magnificent.
But the ball fell to an open Spargo. Fox, still at full tilt, ran past the Demons goalsneak, turned and steadied just as Spargo snapped across his body for what looked like a certain goal.
Fox smothered the kick. The ball had clearly left the Spargo boot, making it more difficult for the defensive player, but with both arms out-stretched upwards the Sydney #42 pulled off the miraculous. Again.
Sydney cleared and Melbourne’s big moment was lost.
“What a smother. What a smother by Fox,” Seven commentator Brian Taylor screamed as the Swans took the ball downfield. “It was mid-air. It was gigantic … just as Melbourne were surging .. Sydney take a bow.”
They did that and more, winning by 22 points to book a semi-final showdown with Collingwood, which would lead them to the 2022 grand final against Geelong.
In a matter of seconds Fox had demonstrated to the outside football world exactly why he is valued so highly by Swans insiders. Because he epitomises what team sport is all about.
He asks for and expects nothing individual in return, and when it comes to low key he is as low key as it gets. Just happy to get a game and do his best for his mates.
On Sunday the now 31-year-old will have a rare moment in the spotlight when he becomes the 143rd Swans player to play 100 games.
At 31 years 103 days, he’ll be the sixth-oldest. And of those older, Lance Franklin had played 182 games at Hawthorn before joining Sydney, Paul Williams 189 games at Collingwood, and Rhyce Shaw 94 at Collingwood.
So only Bill Windley, a member of the first South Melbourne side in 1897, and Joe Prince, who joined South in 1910 after two years at St Kilda, were really older. And they played in an era of 17 or 18-game home-and-away seasons.
Indeed, Fox is a rarity. A junior basketball star from Burnie, Tasmania, via Aberfeldie in the Essendon District Football League and VFL club Coburg, he has walked a different path to the Swans 100-Game Club.
Having moved to Melbourne on a joint study/football mission, he was playing in 2013-14 at Aberfeldie when he had been dropped from the senior side. In both years. The AFL may as well have been on a different planet for a young man more focussed on his academic pursuits than his football.
He’d been living on campus at La Trobe University, driving across town to train and play at Aberfeldie, and getting home to find his mates in party mode.
He contemplated giving football away to get “a proper Uni experience” but as fate would have it, he lost his campus accommodation in a squeeze on numbers at La Trobe. Football survived.
In 2014 Fox was spotted playing with Aberfeldie by Peter German, a one-time North Melbourne star who was coaching Coburg in the VFL after assistant-coaching roles at Hawthorn, West Coast, Fremantle and Western Bulldogs and two WAFL premierships with Subiaco.
At first Fox discounted German’s bid to lure him to Coburg, but then West Coast midfielder Matt Priddis, who had played under German at Subiaco, won the Brownlow Medal. And in his acceptance speech he spoke glowingly about German’s influence.
Fox, coming off back-to-back grand final losses at Aberfeldie and partway through a four-year Bachelor of Education degree he was doing part-time over eight years, decided to give football one last crack.
He played only “seven or eight” VFL games with Coburg in an injury-disrupted 2015, but in 2016 things started to fall into place. He’d even had a 20-minute meeting with Swans recruiting boss Kinnear Beatson late in the season. It ended without any sort of commitment and he thought nothing of it.
And then, on 27 November, two days after the Swans had taken Ollie Florent and Will Hayward in the national draft and the night before the rookie draft, he got another call from Beatson telling him he was about to become a Swan.
So, the next day he packed up and drove with fellow rookie draftee Ben Ronke to Sydney. Something which two years earlier he hadn’t even dreamed off was suddenly a reality.
The 185cm utility, one of the best endurance runners at the club, inherited jumper #42, which had been worn most often by Paul Bevan and most recently by Xavier Richards. Bevan’s 129 games in #42 from 2004-11 included the 2005 premiership, while Richards’ 12 games from 2013-16 including the 2016 grand final.
After the Swans lost in Round 1, 2017 to Port Adelaide at the SCG, when Ollie Florent became Swans player #1406 in John Longmire’s 150th game as coach, Fox debuted with Hayward and second-year rookie Nic Newman against the Western Bulldogs at Marvel Stadium.
He played Rounds 2, 3 and 4. In 2018 he played Rounds 1 and 2, Rounds 6 and 7, Rounds 16-19, and Rounds 22 and 23. A pattern was developing. In 2019 Fox played Rounds 7-11 and Rounds 18-23.
In the Covid season of 2020 he was an emergency in Rounds 1 and 2 and Round 5, but played the other 14 games. Only 10 players played more games. But at season’s end he was delisted, before being taken back as a rookie ahead of the 2021 season.
Fox was elevated to the senior list at the end of 2023, and in June this year he was spared the agony of another end-of-season wait when he signed through to the end of 2025.
Fox’s career statistics of 99 games, 52 wins, one draw, 1290 possessions (average 13.0) and 14 goals are what might be expected of a role player, and while playing 99 games he’s missed 76 through injury or non-selection.
But his career-best statistics exemplify the qualities his teammates respect so much.
Only once has he kicked more than one goal. It was back in his sixth game against Geelong at Kardinia Park in Round 6, 2018, and his old travel mate Ronke’s debut. After the Swans trailed by 22 points at three-quarter time he kicked two goals in the last quarter as they won by 17.
In Round 10 last year, when the Swans played North Melbourne at Marvel Stadium, Fox had a career-best 28 possessions as they came from 16 points down 10 minutes into the final term to win by three points. That was Lachlan McAndrew’s debut.
In the 2022 grand final, when the Swans copped an 81-point hiding from Geelong, Fox had 26 possessions to rank second only to Chad Warner’s 29 on the team possession count. And he played 91 per cent game time – more than each teammate except Lance Franklin and Tom McCartin.
And the only other time he had 26 possessions? It was last Sunday against Brisbane at the Gabba … almost as if just to make sure he was selected for game #100 this week.
Through his up-and-down Swans career Fox has done his best to live a ‘normal’ life away from football. After completing his BA he volunteered as a teacher at Paddington Primary School on his day off, did an Advanced Diploma of Business, and commenced his MBA.
Joint winner of the AFLPA’s Education and Training Award in August last year, Fox has also been an ambassador for the Black Dog Institute, helping with mental health training among high school students.
Congratulations Robbie Fox on 100 AFL games.
