What do you call a bunch of IPL commentators?

So I was going to write about the IPL uniforms, but the uniform garishness of the teams' apparel left me at a loss for words.

Insert speechless pause here.

I mean really, how do you describe a Neapolitan ice cream with multiple-personality disorder, a rainbow on acid, a fatal collision between a crayon box and a truck full of corporate logos? And what are those flesh-coloured arm bandages that stick out below the shirtsleeves? And why are sports uniforms called strips, when they're clearly meant to cover things up and blind us to any deficiencies that may lie beneath?

As you can tell, I was speechless.

The IPL does have its compensations - like watching AB de Villiers grow wings - but mostly it hurts my eyes. So I put my head back and listened to the commentary with my eyes closed, and this, I have to tell you, is an unparalleled joy. Particularly listening to the gifted Mike Haysman, who some cricket writers seem to think is South African. He isn't. He's Australian. The accents are entirely different, people. Learn to listen.

Besides Haysman, the IPL has snared a clutch of sterling commentators, like Brad Hogg, Dominic Cork and Ravi Shastri, who really should be a guitarist that gave birth to a Grammy-award-winning daughter.

Hang on, I just said clutch... no one wants to clutch a commentator, unless Simon Taufel takes up commentary. What is the collective noun for commentators, anyway?

In my extreme youth, when we in South Africa were exposed to the honeyed perambulations of Charles Fortune, I'd have said it was a ramble of commentators. Fortune spoke about the sky a lot, and the birds, and the trees, and sometimes a little about the cricket, and he did it all beautifully. I don't know if he had a daughter. If he did, and if she were unmarried, she'd be called Miss Fortune, but I'm sure she'd be proud of her dad and he'd fit into the IPL digression of commentators - collusion? condensation? conflation? - perfectly, although I don't know if the inestimable Mr Fortune would take kindly to the new cricketing terms that this phantasmagorical league has created.

First of all there's the six, now referred to as "the DLF maximum". How Charles would cringe. The IPL commentators probably do too, when they're forced to follow corporate scripts containing words like "Citi", "Oracle" and "Karbonn Kamaal" (easy to drop that one into commentary, when a bowler is failing to get over the second hump, exactly as his predecessor did).

Every sport gets commercialised. It's the nature of the games. I wouldn't be surprised if other companies caught on to this lucrative marketing stream. Soon we may have the Woolworths Duck ("We can guarantee its freshness, because it spends very little time exercising, so it remains fat and juicy, and it has a really fine leg"); and the Volkswagen Golf, when beleaguered batsmen take a huge swing at a wide ball; and maybe the Lloyd's Run-Out…

The IPL feature closest to my heart, however, is the trumpet. According to those who have actually been in the box where the trumpet is played, it only blares when the person with the authority to push buttons goes ahead and uses his authority, and pushes a button on a turntable. Okay, so maybe it's not exactly a turntable, more like an electronic piece of equipment that makes a noise, whatever such instruments are called this week.

I can't help comparing this artificially manufactured enthusiasm generator to the vuvuzela, an authentic plastic trumpet (one of several million, or at least several hundreds of thousands, of authentic plastic trumpets) that will be wielded and blown by South Africans during the upcoming FIFA World Cup. The deafening sound of the vuvuzela is probably the only advantage the home team will have, although it pains me to say it.

Not that I'm interested in football. Personally, I'd rather keep my eyes shut as a cricketer dressed in Gandalf-sponsored strip hits another DLF Maximum, and the commentator tells us how clever he is to have chosen the right bank.