Sports pages of the world's press were being hurriedly re-written this morning after journalists discovered to their horror that the England one-day cricket team had actually won a match against the Australians. The Spoof! has learnt that not a single cricket reporter bothered to watch the game yesterday, many choosing instead to watch the boxing match between Lennox Lewis and a 12 year-old girl, which they viewed as "harder to call".
Hacks were alerted to the event only this morning when a columnist from The Racing Post, who had gone along to the match as a cure for his high blood pressure, woke up to find the scoreboard still displaying the startling result. He immediately called his colleagues at the newspaper, who at first dismissed the reports as "the drunken ravings of a fantasist".
Headlines such as "Shame of Flintoff's Flops against mighty Australia" in The Telegraph, "Woeful England beaten to a pulp by cruising Aussies" in The Daily Mail and "What a bunch of twats" in The Sun were transformed by the evening editions into glowing tributes to "Freddy's heroes" and "Gallant England". Meanwhile The Mirror urged knighthoods for the entire team and for Duncan Fletcher to coach all national sports teams and write this year's Eurovision song contest entry.
Accusations of hypocritcal, two-faced reporting were rejected as "preposterous", "ridiculous", "absolutely true" and "what would you like me to say?" by reporters.
