"We first had the idea on Day One of the test match at Edgbaston," slurred England's chairman of selectors.
"The selectors' panel were drinking Pimms in the pavilion all afternoon long, and whenever one of the human stumblebums spilled a simple catch, or got out playing a moronically poor pull shot to a rising ball on leg stump, one of us would shout: 'A dog could do better than that!'
"That evening, over the sixth round of lagers in some awful curry house near the Bullring, we all thought: 'well, what about it?'
"So today, we're abolishing the Marylebone Cricket Club as unfit for purpose and replacing it with the Muttleybone Cricket Club.
"The collection of village idiots and ditch sleepers we used to have in the national team will be replaced with a pack of cockapoos, pomskis, labradoodles and lurchers randomly chosen from the Battersea Dogs Home.
"They'll field a hell of a lot better than the human squad ever did, and not drop dollies in the slips. We'll be placing the speediest of them at deep mid whippet and long dog leg.
"Using Pavlovian methods, we'll train them to play the most basic defensive and attacking strokes, as taught in the MCC Coaching Manual for Cricketing Toddlers - skills which have consistently eluded England's human XI, however many choc drops we've fed them.
"We'll be throwing in a couple of goldfish for good measure, because while every human got out at Edgbaston in exactly the same way as he did the week before at Lords - swatting airily at a bouncer and getting caught in the deep - the goldfish may be better at remembering their previous mistakes."
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