Lobats strategy for the grand final set to go like a Porsche

A special report has been drafted after the minutes of a special brains trust (sorry, that was lack of brains and trust) was leaked and lodged on wikileaks. The author of this article is now hiding in the Tibetan embassy fighting extradition charges to Timbuctoo.

You, however, get to enjoy reading about the strategy planning session for the grand final with only the risk of falling asleep mid-sentence.

Never before has a Lobats strategy session been recorded. But this was because the old buggers who have these sessions never remember what they just said, so it was impossible to record anything. The minutes of this meeting, however, show how great minds don't work, so this is a revelation.

It turns out that one bright spark on the management committee called the special meeting and laid out the following dilemma. He said that given the Lobats had been in reverse gear all season and had somehow made it to the finals, something needed to be done. The rest of the senior Lobats couldn't understand why.

He decided to use a metaphor to explain. He said the Lobats had been like a car that has been backfiring all season and a good mechanic needed to take a good look at the engine to figure out what was wrong and fix it. He said he had already done this and presented what he had learnt.

It turns out that the Lobats is a very old car. That of course is not news to anyone. What is new is this car was built after the first World War in Europe - Eastern Europe to be exact - most likely by men in black and white stripped uniforms who spent their days behind bars so they didn't leak any information on this car.

The car was one of a kind. Nothing like it had been seen before. It had 12 cylinders, occasionally 13, depending on the day. Being one of a kind, no spare parts are currently available. Now anyone who knows anything about cars knows that a car with 12 cylinders is great and such a car is likely to out muscle most others in a race. So the senior Lobats were feeling pretty good about themselves. Hi-fives all around, a few pats on the back and a few back rubs were seen during this part of the meeting.

This is when a bombshell was dropped. It was made clear that cylinders by themselves were pretty useless. You needed good spark plugs to ignite the fuel in the cylinders and push the cylinder heads up and down to convert the fuel into motion. This is where the problem was, he said. All season, only one spark plug was providing a spark, which meant the car had been working on one cylinder. The other cylinders had been doing their own thing - walking to the beat of their own drum and these drums had stopped beating years ago - mainly due to age.

This was incredible insight. It meant that we simply needed to replace 11 sparkplugs. As you know, the Lobats had a combination of sparkplugs from India (Gujurat mainly) and Sri Lanka. There is one spark from Australia but as you know everything in Australia is made in China, so we're pretty sure that spark is really Chinese.

But the problem is it's always a different sparkplug that works at different times in different matches. So it was suggested that we replace all the not so bright sparks, which meant finding another team to play the finals. The senior members of the club said that was not an option. So the alternative was to find a way to get the current sparks to spark.

To do this, the mechanic suggested that they compare the engine of the Lobats to the engine of a Porsche to determine how to fine tune the Lobat. There happened to be a nice blue Porsche parked at every game, so they decided to compare the engines of the two, side by side.

They opened the bonnets of both and realised the problem immediately.

One bright old spark shouted 'Uh huh, I found the problem. We don't have an engine!" Everyone else quickly pointed out that the old fellow was looking at the Porsche and not the Lobat. Then it occurred to them why the Germans didn't have a cricket team - they didn't know how to build an engine.

But this got everyone thinking. Now, as you know, thinking is not the strength of the senior team members. Swing first, get out and then ask questions later, is the usual modus operands. If the Porsche didn't need an engine and was the benchmark that all car companies aspired to, we simply needed to get rid of our engine all together. Finally logic prevailed for the first time in the history of the Lobats, which as you know is some 3700 years or so.

One of the senior members, who knew a thing or two about sports cars, said removing the engine was a great idea because it will make the car much lighter and it can go faster. Absolute genius. Everyone couldn't believe no one had thought of this earlier. That's always the case with brilliant ideas. True genius sounds simple in hindsight - just ask Einstein, or whoever invented the zip. Actually, who invented the zip?

All we need to do now is park the car on the top of a very tall hill and give it a small push. And that ladies and gentlemen is the strategy for the finals. Read all about how it turns out next week. Howzat!