The Republic of Ireland will now hold their delayed news conference at 14:30 BST before they face Israel in tomorrow’s Nations League fixture in Hungary – a fixture campaigners have called on them to boycott.<\/p>\n
Heimir Hallgrimsson’s team are scheduled to meet Israel in Debrecen at 19:45 BST, with the return fixture in Backa Topola, Serbia on 4 October.<\/p>\n
They have faced calls to withdraw from the games because of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war<\/a> with a “Stop The Game” campaign – organised by the pressure group Irish Sport for Palestine – gathering pace.<\/p>\n Former Republic of Ireland manager Brian Kerr and ex-international James McClean are among those to have backed calls for a boycott.<\/p>\n However, there are also Irish supporters, perhaps less vocal, who have always believed that the match should be played with supporters in attendance.<\/p>\n Following Thursday’s 1-0 defeat by Kosovo, midfielder Jason Knight opined he didn’t think “the game should be going ahead”<\/a>, while winger Chiedozie Ogbene urged the public to not “put the pressure on us”<\/a> regarding their approach to the scheduled game.<\/p>\n Hallgrimsson and a player were scheduled to meet the media at 09:15 BST (10.15 local time), before training, but the conference was delayed shortly beforehand.<\/p>\n A Uefa official entered the room to inform waiting media teams that the press conference was postponed until after training, which would have been about 11:30 BST (12.30 local time).<\/p>\n But shortly afterwards, the Uefa official returned to the media room to announce that the Republic of Ireland’s training session had also been postponed.<\/p>\n Players were locked in a meeting at the team hotel with unconfirmed reports goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu had withdrawn from the fixture with several others considering their positions.<\/p>\n However, just around 13:00 BST, the players began to emerge from their meeting room with it soon confirmed they would travel back to the stadium for the planned news conference with training scheduled for 14:45 BST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Republic of Ireland will now hold their delayed news conference at 14:30 BST before they face Israel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-783276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}