Ireland Beats Israel 3-0 In Game Nobody Wanted

Call ‘em the Badwill Games. Ireland scored three early goals and cruised to a 3-0 win over Israel in the first of two matches between the teams that have already made everybody go ewwwwww. The game, played in Debrecen, Hungary, was the first of two very controversial matches between the national teams as part of the UEFA Nations League competition. Ireland had requested that UEFA ban Israel from the tournament, but that was denied, as was a subsequent appeal to be moved out of the same bracket. A national campaign then formed in Ireland to prevent the matches from happening. A group of 160 Irish athletes signed a petition released late last week calling for the matches to be cancelled. RTE, the Irish national broadcasting network, announced that it would only have limited coverage of the matches. Heimir Hallgrímsson, the Iceland-born manager of the Irish team, defended fielding a squad by saying, "We're not playing with genocide. We're playing against genocide."

Read it at Defector ↗

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