Prodding Fate

GH on Rohit Sharma's travails

The word ‘prod’ is, in cricket, peculiarly expressive. In seeming to combine prop and plod, it implies something tentative and apologetic, without energy or purpose; it is a step halfway to nowhere. You won’t find ‘prod’ in any textbook but you know when you see it. You saw one yesterday as Rohit Sharma motioned towards the third ball of Pat Cummins’s sixth over - half-heartedly with his feet, speculatively with his hands - and nicked off to leave India five for 74, well in arrears of Australia’s 445.