Euro 2008 prepares for B-grade hooligan influx

Police in Austria and Switzerland are bracing themselves for a relaxed and trouble-free European Championships following the failure of England, Scotland and their maruading band of mindless hooligans to qualify for attendance.

Despite initial fears that English fans might turn up to games anyway in the hope of a bit of "violence by osmosis" and the lack of anything better to do with their summer holidays, the Austrian defence ministry said today that the greatest fear for their personnel was having to share a drink or two with German fans in Vienna's town square.

In other Euro 2008 news, Italy's hopes of winning the tournament were dealt a blow on Monday with the loss of centre-back Fabio Cannavaro with a serious knee injury. The defender collapsed in a heap at training after a challenge from a teammate but was not treated for more than half an hour.

It transpired that medical staff and teammates has assumed that Cannavaro was practising one of the team's many diving and injury feigning drills and it was only his lack of agonised screams and failure to roll around on the ground that alerted the team doctor to the fact that he actually was injured.

Denton to jocks: "Fear the man with the glasses"

With a few drips of Wayne Carey's blood dripping from his teeth, bespectacled nerd poster-boy Andrew Denton was tonight celebrating another triumph of brains over brawn.

Denton subjected Carey to the television equivalent of a root canal without anaesthetic on his highest-rating Enough Rope show to date.

Equipped with neither a basic sense of self-awareness nor the verbal arsenal to defend the indefensible, Carey was left squirming and stammering under Denton's razor sharp questioning; and late in the 2 hour interrogation the former North Melbourne champion was left to suffer the ultimate indignity - listening to a clip of Derryn Hinch.

The irony of Denton's triumph was not lost on the host who said, 'Sure if we met down a dark alley, Wayne would have ensure that most of my organs were left on the outside of my body. But I always knew that after many girl-friend free years and evenings alone reading Patrick White, one day I'd get a legendary jock on the rack and make him suffer an atomic television wedgie!”

Denton suggested that while Carey had found the lengthy interview with him painful, he would probably find a lengthy jail term bunking in with Kevin ‘Bubba’ Smith at Florida State Prison even more so.