Irish Daily Mirror and Daily Star In Same Blatter Head Shocker

Ireland was plunged into turmoil this morning as angry consumers were treated to the same headline on the front page of two of the leading tabloid newspapers.
An extraordinary eruption of national outrage was triggered by the bizarre story, which was revealed exclusively, and made front page headlines, in many newspapers today, that disgraced football supremo Sepp Blatter and FIFA had made a €5million payment to the FAI, as a result of the Thierry Henry handball incident – which effectively knocked Ireland out of the 2010 World Cup. (Hi sub-editor – That sentence is clearly too fucking long by about half a mile. Will have to be shortened but it is clearly beyond my competence to do it myself after a hard night on the batter. Or even on the Blatter, ha, ha. Hope you don’t mind. P.S.).
“I just can’t believe what is happening,” a spokesman for the ordinary people of Ireland told Hot Press. “It is an insult to our intelligence as a race, that these two so called newspapers could think that no one would notice the appalling combination of laziness and sloth, not to mention the clear attempt to short-change the public out of their rights to different headlines on what purport to be different newspapers, involved in both using the same hook to catch the unfortunate fish that are the Irish tabloid-buying public, if you will excuse the rather mangled metaphor. I will be writing to my local representatives about this.”
And what was the infamous headline which had plunged the entire nation into the crisis to end all crises? That is a good question.
HAND OF WAD, both papers had bellowed. And, according to informed sources, once they had gone to press, neither editor could risk backing down, with both insisting: “It was our shit headline. We thought of it first.”
The Mirror had controversially added a defiant ‘definite article’ to their screamer, but consumers were not placated by what they saw as a mere semantic difference.
“I mean, what the fuck?” one disgruntled customer exclaimed, as he was spotted by an undercover Hot Press reporter, staggering back in confusion from the news stands, clearly in shock at what he had just witnessed with his own eyes. It was a bloody mess. “I mean, what the fuck?” he added... “difference…” – the aggrieved consumer appeared to be panting, as if he was in the middle of a cardiac incident as he spoke to our reporter – “ ...do they think an extra f*****g ’the’ makes?”
That too was a good question, notwithstanding the fact that the customer in question was on the ground and clearly in pain when he finished it. Naturally, our reporter left the alleged citizen for dead and hurried to file his report as any good journalist should.
The anger expressed by the dying man reflected a far more widespread and pernicious feeling of dismay which had begun early in the day in the heart of the capital city and, within a matter of just hours, had spread like a wildfire outbreak of foot and mouth disease across the nation, just as quickly as the delivery vans bringing the national newspapers could get to the soon to be shocked owners of newsagents.
“I mean, what the fuck,” one well known Mullingar retailer said, when pressed by Hot Press for a comment. “It wouldn’t have happened in Joe Dolan’s day, but nowadays everything is One Direction this, One Direction that. That’s all I’ll say. All changed. Changed utterly. A terrible headline is born.” And with that he lifted a newspaper and held it in front of his face so that our photographers could not get an exclusive picture of him at the scene of the shambles.
The headline, which appeared on only the Irish editions of the Daily Sun and the Daily Mirror, was a pun on the infamous ‘Hand of God’ blasphemy, committed by disgraced cocaine-snorting serial womaniser and former Argentinian soccer captain, Diego Maradona, after he had shamefully handled the ball to score a so called ‘wonder goal’ in the Argies battle with the clean-living, fun-loving family men of the England team that would otherwise have won the World Cup in 1986.
The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, was unavailable for comment although – barracked by our Special Correspondent – a spokesman did eventually mumble something about the totality of relationships between all the people on this island and our closest neighbours.
You can follow this story throughout the day on hotpress.com. Until then, let's all remind ourselves of the true glory of FIFA (starring Tim Roth as Blatter):