CHENNAI: Rob Moody. Does the name sound familiar? Not quite, right? Let us make it simple. Let us narrow it down and keep this to cricket fans only, or the fanatics. Does Moody ring a bell? Not yet? What if we prune it further and remind you of the old footages – Sachin Tendulkar’s centuries in Perth and Sydney in 1992, Inzamam-ul-Haq run outs, all of Mike Atherton’s dismissals against Curtly Ambrose and Glenn McGrath, Brian Lara’s Houdini act in Barbados and a lot more. Okay. Time to reveal the identity of the one of his kind a video librarian: Robelinda2.
For those who grew up in the era of internet, Robelinda2 was godsend. You read about matches from the past, let imagination run the visuals for you, heard about epics. But deep down, you wanted to know how exactly it unfolded. Be it Kapil Dev’s four successive sixes to save follow-on or Bishan Singh Bedi’s rhythmic action or Dilip Vengsarkar’s centuries at Lord’s or cricket dating back to many more years. You Googled and Robelinda2 gave you the visuals on his YouTube channel. There are many, who bank on Moody to share footage which are of no interest to cricket boards, even broadcasters, yet they stand the test of time.
What started as an accident nearly 40 years ago, became an obsession long time ago. So much so, that his profession as a musician never came in the way. “I was about five or six years old and back in the early 80s, families had started having video recorders in Australia. Channel 9 used to play movies late in the night, followed by highlights of Test matches or Sheffield Shield. So when my father played his old clips, this cricket visuals used to play too. That is when I thought of recording cricket videos. Although I started doing it in my schooldays, it was in the teens that I really started off and it has just kept going,” Moody says.
Moody, who moved to DVDs in the 90s from video tapes and is now converting them to hard disks, has gained considerable popularity since he started sharing his footage on YouTube in 2009. What began as discussions on domestic matches on a cricket forum, led to someone miles away in Australia talking about a particular knock of Greg Blewett. “When he mentioned that innings, I said, ‘hold on, I got that footage’. I didn’t know how to share it and later on I was introduced to YouTube, which was boring then.”What followed has given him cult status.
“I started getting requests from so many people. And I said yes and kept uploading and it hasn’t stopped as yet. Since internet became a viable way, I have been able to share videos and I have footage of loads of stuff dating back to 1920s and 30s. Heaps of old stuff. There are friends all over the world, who send me footage. But I don’t upload them unless they give me permission. I have so many videos, especially from India that I cannot upload. Many keep asking repeatedly about Tendulkar versus Steyn or Sehwag’s 293, 201 and I just can’t do it because I would be shut down immediately by the BCCI.”
Moody, who is a musician on cruise ships, spends half the year in seas and the remainder in a studio in Melbourne where he plays guitar and saxophone. Though showing cricket videos doesn’t fetch him monetary benefits, he knows one day all these videos could be taken down because of copyright issues. Though his videos get numerous hits on YouTube – he has 649K subscribers – it isn’t a commercial channel since the visuals are not owned by him.
“There have been issues. In 2010, no one thought this sort of thing existed, a fan uploading footage. Not many knew what really violated copyrights. We knew which videos would bring problem. And I realised soon after it is safe to upload old videos because cricket boards don’t seem to care. It will be great if I get the freedom to upload footage that I like to. Because I’m sitting on a wealth of footage that I want to show but I can’t. I’m completely hamstrung by copyright issues. The match is over and it already fetched you money. But fans can’t see it again. Which is hard to understand. I’m gonna die one day and there is no use these lying here and of no use to anyone” Moody says.
These days, with most of the world under lockdown because of COVID-19, he has been getting many requests on his Twitter and Facebook handles, and happily obliging. Not just fans, he gets requests from cricketers too, with Dimitri Mascarenhas and Adam Hollioake being the recent ones. You ask him to pick his favourite, and he is quick to respond. “There is one on Ambrose cleaning up all the batsmen, Ponting running out batsmen and one of McGrath which has all the 50 boundaries he hit. All of it took around six months to collect. There is nothing rare about the footage because all of it was on television. But I do know some of my footage are really rare because not many have it, especially when I hear that even the cricket boards don’t have those.”