Ireland 53-69 Luxembourg<\/p>\n
Ireland suffered a heavy defeat to Luxembourg in their opening Women’s EuroBasket 2027 qualifier at the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght.<\/p>\n
Luxembourg are ranked 29 places higher in the world than Ireland but it was hoped that home advantage would negate some of that deficit.<\/p>\n
Instead, from the start it was the visitors who looked like the host team, dominating physically early on and taking the game to Ireland.<\/p>\n
Luxembourg racked up their highest points of any quarter in the game in the first 10 minutes, after which they led 21-11.<\/p>\n
The second quarter was little different and at half-time the scale of the task for Ireland was becoming clear as they trailed 37-21.<\/p>\n
Ireland’s offence had faltered badly at that point and their field goal average of just over 17% in the opening half said everything about their struggles with ball in hand.<\/p>\n
By the end of the third quarter, the result was beyond doubt as Ireland trailed by double scores 52-26.<\/p>\n
To the home side’s credit, they managed to make the scoreboard look less stark from there on as they outscored the visitors 27-17 in the final quarter with a hat-trick of three-pointers by the otherwise little used Bronagh Power Cassidy, contributing to a strong Irish finish.<\/p>\n
But that final flourish came too late as Luxembourg ran their bench players late on in the game, safe in the knowledge that victory was already assured.<\/p>\n
Ireland’s top scorer was Hazel Finn on 10 points while Luxembourg had three players in double figures – Anne Simon (14) Dionne Madjo (13) and team captain Magaly Meynadier (13).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland 53-69 Luxembourg Ireland suffered a heavy defeat to Luxembourg in their opening Women’s EuroBasket 2027 qualifier at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-136632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}