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.