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I<\/span>f you\u2019re reading an article about cricket on the internet, then at some point in your life you have watched a Rob Moody video. It would have bobbed up, a YouTube link in a group chat or a thread of replies. It might have been a compilation of Damien Martyn drives with the frame inverted to make him a left-hander. A collection of Steve Waugh run outs. An hour of West Indies swagger from a Test in 1988.<\/p>\n The video title would have been exclamatory, lapsing partly into caps lock, telling you that this clip was hilarious or this performance a work of genius or that the whole episode qualified for Rob\u2019s greatest compliment, \u201cold gold\u201d. Most often the title would be true. From a meticulous archive of every cricket match televised in Australia for 40 years, an archive that began purely as a personal hobby, he edited and loaded thousands of hours of footage online for the enjoyment of millions of people.<\/p>\n The channel was Robelinda2. Past tense deliberate. Now it\u2019s gone, nuked by YouTube after a few mad days of receiving copyright complaints in abrupt and coordinated fashion from notional companies that barely seem to exist, just a paper-thin online persona.<\/p>\n Robelinda2 YouTube channel has been officially terminated.<\/p>\n 14 years of fun it was! Thanks for watching!<\/p>\n \u2014 Rob Moody (@robelinda2) November 5, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n <\/gu-island><\/figure>\n On a video call with The Final Word podcast, Moody looks tired. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know. I was driving in Albany, in south Western Australia, up to Fremantle, and I had no reception, and there were fires \u2013 I was literally driving through fire. It was 38C and there was fire everywhere. I was getting all these notifications, and I thought what is going on? I couldn\u2019t get into my channel and I thought the internet was not working properly because it was two bars of 3G. When we actually got to Fremantle, I was like, oh\u2026 I think the channel\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n With it goes public access to a swathe of cricket history that neither the relevant boards nor broadcasters have shown the interest or ability to make available. Cricket<\/a> Australia is just now catching up, launching a vintage channel two weeks ago whose name of Cricket Gold seems to borrow from Moody, but it is restricted to Samsung devices for those who know where to look, rather than the global availability and algorithmic boost of YouTube.<\/p>\n Nor was Robelinda2 just about plonking an hour of match footage online. It was curated compilations, the bizarre and funny sides of cricket, the ephemera he would remember and extract from full days. Moody didn\u2019t edit highlight reels of shot, shot, wicket. He would put up a bowler\u2019s entire over or a batter\u2019s entire innings, leaving the lead-in and the trail-off, the gaps between deliveries. He enjoyed the commentary as much as the cricket. His clips let you become immersed in something from decades ago.<\/p>\n Even players often had Robelinda2 as their only means of looking back on their feats. \u201cDean Jones contacted me literally two weeks before he died, asking about his twin hundreds against Pakistan in \u201989,\u201d says Moody. \u201cAs soon as he emailed me I\u2019m like, mate, give me five minutes. I\u2019ve got you. Quickest upload I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n Running an archive channel from taped television does involve risk, and Moody has tangled with plenty of copyright objections before \u2013 even though organisations have done nothing with the footage, even though it helps the profile of the game, even though Moody never used his channel for profit. It has been a tightrope exercise. His channel was Robelinda2 because the original Robelinda got shut down years ago, but since then he had worked out the balance.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen cricket boards have come after the channel, it\u2019s usually been pretty good. They usually identify what is the problem, and what I want to do about it,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can almost find whatever you want from the 80s and 90s, but they tend to come down harshly on anything from the 2000s onwards\u2026 I uploaded a two-second video of an Ian Bell cover drive from the SCG in January 2011, and it was blocked before it had finished uploading.\u201d<\/p>\n\n