New EU Directive on International Cricket

The European Union today passed a new directive with regards to the amount of international cricket that any citizen of its states (i.e. England) can play.

The new legislation has come about as a result of a delegation of England players who complained that they currently have to play too much international cricket.

Taking Paul Collingwood and Jimmy Anderson as test cases (as they are members of the test, ODI and T20 sides) EU commissioners were astounded to hear that each player could have played over 100 days international cricket in 2009. That is nearly one day in three and at least twice as many as EU or Domestic MPs work each year.

Even though Geoffrey Boycott took the stand to complain that modern day cricketers “were all soft” and that “it was much harder in my day” and “my grandmother could play twice as much cricket as these weasels do”, the Commission found in favour of the England players delegation.

As such they have issued instructions to the ECB stipulating that each player in the squad will only be able to play test or ODI/T20 cricket from now on, and that those in the test side will only be able to take part in a maximum of seven tests (or 35 days) per year.

For the Captain further restrictions have been laid down to reflect the fact that being captain of your country’s cricket side is the most mentally taxing job in the World. The case of Andrew Strauss was cited where the poor love has had to rest from the tour to Bangladesh so that he can recover from his first year in the job and play no international cricket from mid-January until the end of May. So henceforth the captaincy will have to rotate for each test match with no player being captain for more than two tests per year.

So far the Reverse Sweep has only managed to contact two players that have played for England in the last year. Both Ravi Bopara and Owais Shah said that they were delighted with the move and that they looked forward to playing for England again soon.

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