Tomás Ó Flatharta

As if there wasn’t already enough heat surrounding Ireland’s basketball meeting with Israel in Latvia on Thursday evening, the comments of Dor Saar, one of the Israeli squad, have added yet more fuel to the fire.
Speaking to Israel’s official basketball site, which noted that the team isn’t “officially talking about the Irish and their behaviour lately”, Saar, a United States-based student, said: “It’s known that they [Ireland] are quite anti-Semitic, it’s not a secret, so we are expecting an intense game. We need to show that we’re better than them and to win. We speak about it between ourselves, we know that they don’t love us so we will leave everything on the court, as always. And especially in this game.”
Basketball Ireland responded with no little fury to Saar’s comments, branding them, in a statement to the Irish Independent, as “inflammatory and wholly inaccurate”, saying that they had raised her remarks with Fiba, the International Basketball Federation.
Fiba, meanwhile, have said that they will look into online posts by the Israeli federation which featured photos of the Israeli Defence Force’s mixed gender Bardelas battalion, dubbed the Cheetahs, visiting the team in the build-up to the game, one showing an assault weapon lying at the side of the court where they were training.