{"id":442703,"date":"2025-03-06T19:37:40","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T20:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/?p=442703"},"modified":"2025-03-06T23:13:04","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T23:13:04","slug":"english-cricket-forced-to-apologise-over-pope-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/?p=442703","title":{"rendered":"English cricket forced to apologise over Pope joke"},"content":{"rendered":"

T\ufeffhe England and Wales Cricket Board<\/a> (ECB) has been forced to apologise over a joke about Pope Francis.<\/p>\n

The 88-year-old Pope has been under medical care for a number of weeks and is reportedly battling a respiratory condition.<\/p>\n

This week was Ash Wednesday, which is one of the most revered dates on the catholic calendar.<\/p>\n

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The Pope's X account\ufeff posted to mark the day.<\/p>\n

"The Ashes remind us of who we are, which does us good," it read.<\/p>\n

"It puts us in our place, smooths out the rough edges of our narcissism, brings us back to reality, and makes us more humble and open to one another.<\/p>\n

\"Pope<\/p>\n

"None of us is God; we are all on a journey."<\/p>\n

Under that post, the official ECB account commented, \ufeff"Even @Pontifex loves The Ashes".<\/p>\n

It was a cheeky play on words regarding the iconic Test cricket series between England and Australia, for which the prize is an urn of ashes.<\/p>\n

\ufeffThe ECB later deleted the comment and apologised.<\/p>\n

"This was an ill-judged post and was swiftly deleted. We apologise for any offence," England's governing cricket body said.<\/p>\n

Ironically, England has not won an Ashes series in a decade.<\/p>\n

The women's team was embarrassed by Australia in their multi-format series Down Under earlier this year.<\/p>\n

The men's team was most recently knocked out of the Champions Trophy by Afghanistan last week.\ufeff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

T\ufeffhe England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has been forced to apologise over a joke about Pope Francis. The 88-year-old Pope has been under medical […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":442705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=442703"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442706,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442703\/revisions\/442706"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/442705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=442703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=442703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=442703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}