Rob Moody, perhaps better known by his YouTube and Twitter user name Robelinda2, has opened up on his thinking behind the creation of a video that sparked the reemergence of a 20-year-old grudge between Shane Warne and Steve Waugh.
“And then all the news agencies picked up on it, so I had a 24 hours of fame thing. Some people looked at the video and actually went through each run out to actually find out how many he was responsible for, and it turns out I was right. The video did justify my initial thought that he wasn’t responsible for burning all his teammates like everyone initially thought.”
Warne, quoting a tweet from Robelinda2 showing a compilation of times when Waugh’s batting partner was run out, repeated the claim from his 2018 autobiography No Spin that the former Australia captain was “the most selfish cricketer” that he ever played with. However, Moody says that his intention was to show how, despite what the stats said, Waugh wasn’t responsible for his partner’s downfall overly often.
For the record AGAIN & I’ve said this 1000 times – I do not hate S Waugh at all. FYI – I picked him in my all time best Australian team recently. Steve was easily the most selfish cricketer that I ever played with and this stat……. https://t.co/QMigV788L7
— Shane Warne (@ShaneWarne) May 15, 2020
“That was just something that you can’t predict,” he said on the Wisden Cricket Weekly Podcast. “It started when Cricinfo posted a tweet that showed [Waugh] was involved in the most run outs in cricket history. I instantly was triggered because I love Steve Waugh. I was like, ‘Are you kidding? Someone’s made this up. It’s gotta be Inzamam, surely. Has to be.’ I argued for a bit and thought, ‘the only way we’re gonna know is if someone puts up a video of all the run outs’, and even as I was thinking those words, I was like, ‘Yeah, someone. It’s gonna be me.’
“I thought, if I had that video it would be pretty awesome since I was pretty sure he wasn’t responsible for running out 73 of his partners. The stat in itself is not the full story. The few that I thought of in my head were when Steve Waugh was at the non-striker’s end and the batsman called for a single and he got run out. It was his own terrible call. And I thought, ‘I wonder how many of those there are.’ So I started to do a few and went down that rabbit hole.
“I got about halfway and thought, ‘This is pretty cool, what a cool video to put out there. This is definitely not something you see very often.’ And I thought, ‘I’ll just go all the way and get as many as I could.’ I didn’t get them all because there’s some footage that’s just impossible to get, like Australia’s tour of India in 1986/87, it’s just impossible. But I got most of them, 95 per cent of them. But the intention was to show that he wasn’t the culprit for the run outs! Little did I know a certain King of Spin was waiting at home, drinking his own brand gin. He got on it and everyone just went nuts.”
Although Moody described Waugh’s calling as “just awful” in a tweet sent while compiling the mammoth video, he felt that the final product vindicated his first assessment of the great Australian, despite what many on social media were saying.
Wow ! So S Waugh was involved in the most ever run outs in test cricket (104) & ran his partner out 73 times – is that correct ? Mmmmmmmmm https://t.co/TpEnbnDG1q
— Shane Warne (@ShaneWarne) May 15, 2020
“Everyone thought I was this massive Steve Waugh hater and I still can’t shake the tag,” he said. “People think I really hate him, like I’ve got this vendetta against him.
Listen to the Wisden Cricket Weekly Podcast on the Podcast App or Spotify.
