Rather fraggistamatic

While fans are used to post-match press conferences, where captains and coaches discuss the performance of their teams, they were taken by surprise when they were treated recently to the world's first post-commentary press conference. During this one-of-a-kind event, commentary team "captain" Sameer Kochchar held forth on the performance of his team, and threw light on future plans.

"We know that there are a lot of people listening to our commentary on TV, judging from the many empty seats in the stands. Heh Heh." he began, causing mild discomfort among the IPL officials present.

"Well, we're bringing in some changes for the next few games - Arun Lal sits out, and Aakash Chopra and Saba Karim will come in. We hope that their inclusion will help us improve our dismal performance in the earlier games. At the very least, we hope their commentary is more exciting than the cricket they're known for. Heh heh," he continued, causing mild discomfort among his fellow commentators.

When asked about Arun Lal's omission from the team for the recent games, Kochchar predictably denied that Lal had been dropped. "Not at all. He's merely being rested - he's suffering from an injury to his amygdala, and a mildly strained hypothalamus. Arun is a great commentator who brings a lot to the table (yeah, right), and we're confident he'll soon be back to his best (whatever that means). Heh heh," he added, managing the twin feats of using parentheses in spoken conversation and completing a hat-trick of Heh Hehs.

"It's a pity we can't combine Aakash Chopra and Arun Lal, which would give us all-time commentary great Aakash Lal," a grinning Kochchar signed off, before saying "Over to you, Mandira" by force of habit, causing mild discomfort to Mandira Bedi.

Meanwhile, the IPL commentary team is also facing a rather unique problem - having exhausted all their superlatives, such as "amazing", "unbelievable" and "tracer bullet" in describing unremarkable things such as edged boundaries and hits that barely clear the ropes, they're now running out of words to describe truly stunning feats, such as Rohit Sharma's hat-trick against Mumbai.

"It doesn't really work when you use the same word to describe a broad spectrum of events ranging from a quiet single to mid-on to far more impressive stuff, like a century off 50 balls.", said Danny Morrison, looking eerily like that singer from UB40. "So we've hit upon the imaginative solution of inventing whole new superlatives for this purpose. Among the early prototypes are "uberscafalicious", "fraggistamatic" and "corphulesteephalent", he explained, before wistfully adding, "Now there remains the major problem of getting Ranjit Fernando to pronounce the new terms without sounding like a creaking wrought-iron gate."

The past week also saw other noteworthy occurrences, such as John Buchanan's new idea of using hieroglyphics to fill out his credit-card application, Meiyang Chang's continued quest to be accepted into human society, and K Srikkanth setting a new world record for using the phrase "I think" 23 times in a single sentence.

Also, in related news, Robin Jackman has been furiously looking for Mark Nicholas, angered at constantly being referred to as "Jackass". "How would he like being repeatedly called 'Knickers'?" an angry Jackman was heard muttering.