Before AI, Cricinfo had Robin Abrahams

Long before there was Siri or Alexa, there was Robin.

Robin Abrahams, who died on Monday at the age of 68, was one of the unsung titans of the Cricinfo phenomenon: a tireless behind-the-scenes operator who knew the answer to every query, and could provide it at any moment of day or night.

In the days before smartphones, let alone AI, his online presence was legendary. For many of his colleagues stationed all around the world, whose only interactions with "Robin" came via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and latterly MSN Messenger's flashing green Cluedo figure in the bottom corner of their desktops, it was hard to believe that this unrelenting disseminator of information was anything other than a machine himself.

And yet, Robin was as real as they came; a larger-than-life character with a distinctive squeaky Essex voice, like a jollier version of Graham Gooch, whose emergency trips to the company's data centre in the Docklands were the stuff of company legend, coming as they invariably did in the wake of another server-melting century from Sachin Tendulkar.

Robin knew which buttons needed to be pressed, and when, and invariably knew the answer before most of his colleagues had even formulated the question: whether that was the DLS target in a rain-affected ODI, the latest standings in his manually updated County Championship table, or the result of Gibraltar versus France in the European Championships.

As with many such technically minded folk in the years before the internet offered genuine job prospects, Robin's arrival at Cricinfo in the mid-1990s was initially on a part-time basis: despite being a trained chef, his day job was actually a night job, working as a security guard at Selfridges, which clearly primed him well in the art of functioning without sleep.

Robin's eye for detail and insatiable work ethic quickly made him indispensable in a range of guises, most notably the formatting of scorecards - both historic data to backfill Cricinfo's archive and the rapidly incoming glut of new matches, from every corner of the cricket-playing world.

Before long, however, Cricinfo was into its rocketship years, and he'd found his true calling, overseeing the website's exponentially expanding database, which grew from a meagre 126,932 page views in its first year of official existence in 1993 to a whopping 1,623,934,656 by 2002, when the company in its original guise was bought out by Wisden.

With most of the nascent World Wide Web then still operating on old-school dial-up connections, the challenge was to deliver this glut of information in a guise that met the company's growing commercial imperatives but without crashing any systems along the way. Robin was alive to the challenge.

"As a designer coming into the digital age, Robin taught me so much about servers and technical processes," said Tim McConnell, who was Cricinfo's New Zealand-based designer from 1999 to 2002. "I tried to push the boat out a few times and I'd get a phone call from him, always chipper in a different time zone, saying I'd overloaded a server thanks to my graphics! He never got mad, because he knew I loved cricket and I was just trying to do my best for the commercial side. I loved his passion, he lived Cricinfo, and I loved him for that."

Following the site's merger with Wisden.com in 2003, Robin was retained to oversee the new company's live-scoring operation, a relentless task in international cricket's 24-hour cycle, and one that led to some unconventional workplaces. Following a heart bypass operation some years ago, Robin astonished his colleagues by bouncing almost instantly out of theatre to pass comment on the ongoing Test match - this time with the flashing yellow icon of Yahoo! Messenger having taken over as the company's intercom of choice. Around the same time, he finally went on holiday for the first time in years. "Good news," came his first message to the managing editor upon arrival. "There's WiFi on the beach…"

Robin was across every squad announcement, every player profile update, every quirky stats page that required manual input - such as "Hundred runs before lunch in Tests" - with bewildering proactivity. On the morning of August 7, 2005, while the rest of the cricket world was transfixed by Australia's impending two-run loss at Edgbaston, Robin's MSN icon blinked into life once more. "Worcestershire docked one point for a slow over-rate," he announced to no-one in particular. The match, as it happened, had finished the previous day.

If in doubt, he made it his business to go as directly as he could to the source of any required information. Once, following reports of the death of a prominent statistician, he was tasked with investigating. "I left him a voicemail," came the answer, "but he hasn't replied..."

"I spoke to Robin only a few times, and met him just once, but felt his presence all the time," Sambit Bal, ESPNcricinfo's editor-in-chief, said. "He never came to the office, but he never took a day off - or a night. The last mail before you went to bed, wherever you were in the world, would often be from him, and you would wake up to more. The keeper of our database, he cared about its integrity with ferocity. God help any player who wanted a personal detail amended in our player pages: 'Copy of passport, please.' In every way, he was more Cricinfo than most of us."

"Without his eye for detail and his ear for both news and gossip in the cricket world, the whole site would have been the poorer and of markedly less quality," said Mike Whitaker, one of Robin's colleagues in CricInfo's early years.

"All of cricket on the Internet should know they owed him a debt," added another contemporary, Jeff Green. "He kept the wheels running whenever they needed attention."

Following his departure from ESPNcricinfo in 2016, Robin took up a role as a media consultant for the ICC. In addition to managing their mailing lists and updating the world rankings tables, he oversaw the Online Media Zone at global events, including the recent T20 World Cup in the Caribbean. In addition to keeping the site populated with editorial content and press-conference videos, he continued to assist his former colleagues with their inevitable queries.

"Only a few days back I messaged him to see if he had a copy of 2019 World Cup playing conditions," said one such colleague. "He was a surer bet than Google."

"He was a total workaholic, always at his computer and would reply to any query within five minutes," said Sami ul Hasan, who worked with Robin as a former head of ICC media and communications. "Outstanding individual and a thorough professional, who enjoyed and loved his cricket."

James Fitzgerald, a former ICC media official, added: "The game of cricket seems to produce great characters and Robin was certainly one of those. Any time of day or night, he was always available to help you and he cared deeply about the game and its people. He was an eccentric and lovely man and my heart goes out to his friends, family and former colleagues at CricInfo."

Robin was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this month and died after a short illness. He is survived by his wife Ruth and daughters Sarah and Corinne, brother Barrie, and a huge community of admirers around the cricket world.