A RUGBY player has been handed a 12-week ban after injuring an opponent in an insufficiently violent way.
Leinster's Shane Jennings was found guilty of eye-gouging despite having a clear opportunity to take a pair of pliers to his opponent's testicles while stapling his nose to his buttocks.
Jennings insisted: "I'll now focus my life-threatening activities on pulling people's scrota past their arse-cracks, chewing their feet off or thrusting their head into a bucket of piranhas."
A European Rugby Cup spokesman said: "This is the kind of predictable, eye-based violence we are trying to stamp out. Unlike stamping which we are all in favour of, especially if it's right in the eye.
"These players are trained to pull opponents kneecaps off and wear them as monocles. We teach them how to break people's fingers in so many places they can spell out the word 'Rugby' and we show them how to kick someone's jaw so hard that you may as well use it for soup. Eye-gouging just seems lazy."
He added: "I remember one match a few years ago where the number eight punched the fly-half so hard up the ring-piece it was basically Keith Harris and Orville the Duck without the squeaky voice. Happy days."
Law 10.4 of the rules of rugby union football states that while casually kicking someone repeatedly in the eyebrow or eyelid is acceptable, attacks on the eyeball must be carried out in a way that does not bring the sport into disrepute.
Meanwhile the International Rugby Board has welcomed the decision, insisting it would once again send a clear message that rugby is not a sport for homosexuals, despite the well-established mountain of evidence to the contrary.
