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England made to give back Ashes

ENGLAND will today return the Ashes to Australia after the sport’s governing body invoked the Ireland Rule.

Under the regulation a country that is beaten by Ireland at cricket must return any trophies it has won in the last 30 years before undergoing a 48 hour-long Geoffrey Boycott seminar with no toilet breaks.

Australian captain Ricky Ponting said: “There’s no humiliation in waking up to find you’ve been beaten up in a pub brawl the night before, but not when you discover it was by a three year-old girl and her tea set.

“We’ve got Australia’s top quantum physicists – yes, they do exist – to research whether in an infinite number of universes an infinite number of Stuart Broads could exist, and if so has the worst incarnation somehow slipped through a wormhole and started chucking pies at an Irish person?”

Meanwhile the ICC has also asked sides to bowl underarm to England for the remainder of the World Cup and use tiny plastic bats from beach cricket sets.

The squad will then be placed into a separate ‘competition’ to the real teams where they will win a small cup for being really brave and trying really hard.

Once the World Cup has ended the ECB will arrange for the Ashes urn to be permanently rehomed in Australia, with the current England squad being killed, cremated and their ashes installed in its place.

England selector Roy Hobbs said: “We didn’t admit it at the time, but the Ashes series was basically a six-week-long sucker punch for England, the equivalent of predicting a dozen coin tosses in a row, but thank goodness everything has now been beautifully normalised.”

Yesterday’s match has also had repercussions in the financial world, with the Irish economy instantaneously recovering from its slump after a Sligo man put ￡5 on an Irish win when they were 111-2.

 

 

Sky News sell-off will ruin our 
lives, warn Guardian readers

ONE of the greatest Guardian reader conspiracy theories of the last 20 years was under threat last night after Rupert Murdoch agreed to sell Sky News.

Dozens of left-wing people across north London warned their lives would be rendered hollow and meaningless unless Murdoch was given free rein to turn Sky into an ultra-right wing news channel pumping Christian free-market hate ideology into the homes of millions of lower middle class sheep.

Murdoch agreed to the sell-off yesterday as the price for his greater goal of making even more money by giving people lots of telly programmes they want to watch.

Julian Cook, a think-tank consultant and self-certified writer from Finsbury Park, said: “Think of the blogs, think of the comment threads under Guardian articles about anything, think of the dinner parties, oh sweet Jesus, think of the dinner parties.

“I can’t keep complaining about the Daily Mail. It’s like phoning the police every time your 85 year-old neighbour walks down the street in her underpants. I needed this.”

Helen Archer, a gender economist from Highgate, said: “I’d made a cake with ‘Fox News UK’ on it and a picture of Murdoch eating a cake in the shape of Britain. It was very clever.

“I can only assume the sell-off is part of some even greater and more evil conspiracy, almost like something out of Boardwalk Empire, whatever that is.”

Stephen Malley, a man who really gets paid to talk about the media, said: “I was never convinced by the Fox News UK theory given that when I saw Kay Burley interviewing Gordon Brown during the election campaign I was pretty sure she was about 30 seconds away from licking mayonnaise off his bellend.

“That said a News Corp take-over will raise fresh concerns that channels like Sky Arts will be forced to continue to be slightly better than BBC2 used to be.”

Helen Archer added: “It looks like I’ll have to resurrect my 1998 theory that News Corp is just a front for a global heroin dealing operation and that Murdoch is the king of a secret country in central Asia that I think is called ‘Makkapakkastan’.”

 

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