Satire: Mumbai Indians appeal to have 'aged legend' in team to maintain level playing ground

Citing the fact that being forced to keep certain aged players in the team just to ensure viewership and support has taken a toll on their performance, the Mumbai Indians IPL team has appealed to the remaining franchises to do something radical – reserve one spot in the team for a former legend who is clearly past his use-by date.

“This is the only way we can ensure some sort of a level playing field. Right now, there are so many jokes going around that it’s 10 players vs 11 players whenever Mumbai takes to the field,” said someone from the Mumbai Indians management, who requested anonymity as he was frightened that rabid fans would beat him down.

“The only way we can ensure that we win, then, is to have the umpire on our side… This strategy was given to us by Manchester United,” he said, with a wink, before running away from a horde of red jersey-wearing fans (not RCB supporters, in case you’re wondering).

“This is definitely an unusual request, but it’s definitely one that we can discuss,” said IPL bigwig N Srinivasan (more big than wig, really). “After all, we’ve long established that the IPL is more about entertainment than real cricket. So why not make it even more entertaining for the suckers viewers? We already have things like caps on foreign players who can play, so I think it’d be a great idea to have one aged player in the team just to draw in the crowds. We had a marquee player, an icon player – God knows what else – this player we’ll call the Buddhe player.”

Other IPL franchises are debating how to go about this. Kolkata Knight Riders won back millions of Bengali fans by roping in Saurav Ganguly as their Buddhe player. Bangalore have promoted Venkatesh Prasad from bowling coach to Buddhe player, and Siddharth Mallya to chief clown. The recent removal of Mohammad Azharuddin’s ban is good news for the Sunrisers Hyderabad, and the millions across the country who hope to hear the iconic “But-a, the boys-a, played well.”

Delhi Daredevils have gone one step further and sacked their entire current team and replaced them with Buddhe players. “Certainly can’t do any worse than the current lot,” said 51-year old coach Eric Simons, who will now be their opening bowler as well. Other notable players who will now form a part of the Delhi Daredevils squad include Atul Wassan, Maninder Singh, Manoj Prabhakar and Madan Lal. Of course, this could lead to some mischief mongering as well – one cricket writer has suggested that Bangalore should get Bishen Bedi, just so they can see him being forced to bowl with Muttiah Muralitharan.

A positive development from the entire scenario, however, is that the beleaguered (haha, that has the word ‘league’ in it!) viewers of cricket could be spared the torture of having to listen to commentators, since Arun Lal has been roped in by Delhi, Ravi Shastri is likely to play for Pune and Danny Morrison has been roped away to play for the Auckland Aces. Interestingly, an Auckland Aces representative said that his club has received over $2 million in donations over the last few days from ‘grateful cricket fans’.

The idea is likely to spill over to international cricket as well. So fans of Steve Waugh and Dennis Lillee shouldn’t be surprised if the icons are part of the Australian team in the near future. England recently experimented by digging out WG Grace and asking him to open the batting. However, after the first session of play when Dr. Grace was on 2 off 132 balls, fans were confused as to whether it was just Alastair Cook with a beard.

The one country for whom this has major ramifications, of course, is Pakistan. This will lead to two things: in a country notorious for players under-aging themselves, we could soon see a reverse phenomenon. Indeed, a young chap, barely out of school and with no facial hair, submitted a club application with his age as ’47′ recently. The second thing that could happen is Shahid Afridi would always have a constant place in the team. “Haha, now I can retire AND play at the same time! Best of both worlds!,” he said gleefully.

And we all have the legend from Mumbai to thank for this.

DISCLAIMER – This is a satire, and should be taken in jest.