Mega-injunctions: a safe haven for football's super-probosces

This week we return once more to the Former Yugoslav Republic (Twice Removed) of Potya, the tiny country tucked away down the back of Macedonia whose history, short, proud and characterised by sporadic violence, has earned it the title The Dennis Wise of the Nations.

In the past month Potya has undergone the sort of moral convulsions it has not experienced since that amazing day in 2007 when Rita Bloop, Potya's Minister for Internal Violence, came out as the country's first openly female woman, paving the way for an entire generation of similarly gendered citizens to stop faking an interest in conversations about the quickest route to work and get on with the latest Joanna Harris novel.

The unfolding tumult surrounds one of Potyan football's greatest ever stars, FK Stump's veteran midfield libertine Drilla Plook, whose remarkable five decades at the top level of the game is testament to his extraordinary constitution, his professionalism and the fact that for the past 30 years two team-mates have carried him around the field in a chair. Plook's longevity, his physical grace and his penchant for wearing Italian suits woven from the moist breath of Carmelite nuns has raised this humble cattle-prodder's son from the land where mechanically reclaimed meat is king to the status of national hero.

FK Stump's low-slung ball-slinger was recently named Potyan Dad of the Year after it emerged that he had fathered five kids by seven different women during the football season's traditional four-day winter break. Since Potya is a nation where the three principles of the French Revolution, liberty, fraternity and infidelity, are enshrined in the constitution, underlined twice and highlighted in dayglo pink, such wanton behaviour is regarded as highly patriotic. Admittedly concerns were raised about certain aspects of the left-side drifter's lifestyle. However, when asked if he thought he should be engaging in unprotected sex in this day and age, Plook replied defiantly that he did not have sex unprotected as "My bodyguards were in the bedroom wardrobe throughout", which set the nation's mind at ease.

This week, though Plook has faced questions of an entirely different magnitude after it emerged that he had obtained a so-called mega-injuncton from Potya's judiciary. This "garrotting-order" – making it illegal for anybody to even talk to the postman about whatever it was that had allegedly happened – or not – on pain of being strangled by a big man in a Hugo Boss suit and Armani sunglasses – followed an earlier gagging order which had resulted in all of Potya's registered journalists spending six months with gaffer tape stuck over their mouths to prevent them blowing the story wide open talking loudly about Plook on their mobile phones on a crowded tram.

In the modern age, however, suppressing freedom of speech is not so easy as it once was and soon Plook's misdeeds were the subject of frenzied gossip among the members of Potya's leading social networking site, 'Svenbo Larsson's All-Nite Puffin Grill and Dancerie [Over 24s only. Jackets and chest-hair compulsory]'.

As a consequence it was not long before all of Potya knew that Plook had set out systematically to prevent the public from discovering his dark secret – that he has a very large nose.

Plook's reasoning for keeping his gigantic proboscis from protruding into the public domain, as submitted to the courts, was that if the size of his nose became widely known he would be "subject to ridicule from the supporters of rival teams who would yell: 'Blimey, I thought they'd retired Concorde,' and chant: 'He's got Mount Fuji on his face,' and other unpleasantness such as a man of my wealth and fame shouldn't be subjected to".

Thanks to the vigorous work of his legal team Plook has not been photographed or filmed from the side since 1971, while live appearances at stadiums around the country have taken place only under specially dimmed floodlights.

And so things might have remained had Plook's nose not decided to assert itself – apparently driven mad by jealously at the amount of attention his handsome chin cleft had received over the decades – and called on the services of Potya's master of self-publicity, Straff Plak, an expert at crisis manipulation, news massage and media "extras" (which will appear on your bill simply as "sundries").

Plak immediately got to work, appearing on national TV claiming that in Potya noses were treated as second-class appendages and that "there is no way this would have been allowed to happen if my client had been a penis". "The nose is blameless in all this," Plak continued. "It has done nothing wrong. Except maybe that time it sneezed over the salad bar in Pizza Hut."

Plook has yet to respond, but his position as the darling of the Potyan public is under threat. It is true that the player has survived scandals in the past, notably back in 2009 over his relationship with Beebo Tweet – who had placed third in TV talent show Balkans Fame Pimp, behind a teenager who ate her own face and Tibor the Whistling Chihuahua. On that occasion Potya momentarily sucked in its collective breath when it emerged that Plook had paid his former lover €6,000 to keep quiet, and exhaled in relief when it was revealed that he had offered her a further €6,000 if she squeaked a bit. Whether he will escape public opprobrium so easily this time remains to be seen.