An unusual off-shoot from the Queen’s historic state visit to Ireland is that she is now eligible to play for their national football team, it was revealed yesterday, after spending more than twenty-four hours on the Emerald Isle.
A senior official from the FAI formally notified her majesty during her controversial visit to Croke Park and her response was believed to be ‘encouraging’. Gaffer Giovanni Trapattoni meanwhile is said to be seriously considering including the eighty-five year old grandmother in one of his forthcoming squads, describing her as ‘a lot more mobile than that useless feck Gibson’.
By the time she returns to Windsor and the corgis on Friday evening Liz, as she prefers to be known, will have clocked up four days on Irish soil, twice the amount John Aldridge spent there in order to qualify and shout abuse at foreign linesmen. The ferret-faced scouser represented the Republic on sixty-nine occasions yet, prior to his debut, had merely enjoyed a weekend stag piss-up at the Guinness brewery.
Andy Townsend meanwhile had no connection to the country whatsoever aside from a clump of his facial warts resembling the Giants Causeway.
Seamus O’Flanagan , a well respected alcoholic author from Cork who scribed the little-known gem ‘Sporting Monarchs’ claims that it is not unusual for heads of state to play sport at a high level.
‘Not a lot of people know that Liz’s grandfather George V once played pool for a pub named after himself, whilst her uncle Edward was an extremely committed right-winger in his day.’
‘Her majesty herself used to enjoy a kick-about on occasion – always at amateur level – and soon earned the nickname ‘the smiling assassin’. She would engage her marker in a friendly chat, asking him what he did for a living, then wallop in a screamer from twenty yards. There were even persistent rumours that she used to be somewhat of a trouble-maker. In one particular away fixture against a team of dignitaries representing Paris Saint-Germain in the late ‘90s it supposedly all kicked off in the tunnel, a bloodied fracas that she allegedly orchestrated’.
The opportunity to muddy her boots at a professional level may well appeal to the soccer-mad monarch who, according to the royal historian Tarquin Henning-Berg, often cheers on her beloved Reading, her local club, on an old black-and-white television set in the Windsor Castle kitchens.
‘Elizabeth II is an avid viewer of The Football League Show and very much enjoys getting into the spirit of the occasion. She has the scullery maids creased up with laughter as she impersonates the ‘ruffians’ on the terraces, pointing at the screen and shouting ‘Can one hear the Swindon sing? Noo, nooo’ and ‘You’re going home in a chauffeur-driven car.’
