enter

In a side that was already missing key players such as the Charles brothers, Shea and Pierce, and the suspended Daniel Ballard, youth got the opportunity to shine in the final qualifier, which was a dead rubber after Friday’s defeat by Slovakia.

Given they were at risk of suspension, Trai Hume and Justin Devenny were given the evening off, and the talismanic Conor Bradley was withdrawn at half-time.

Jamie Donley will get the headlines after his first international goal, but there was a strong first start for Jamie McDonnell, while Ruairi McConville was again commanding in defence and teenager Patrick Kelly made his senior debut.

“We obviously had to make a lot of changes to the team. If you look at the players we used tonight, five of the players are under 21, so I think that’s really positive for us,” O’Neill said.

“Luxembourg are a good team. The results in this campaign are probably a little bit harsh on them, and their performances have been good.

“They’ve not been beaten easily in any of the games, so we take a lot from the fact that we beat them 3–1 away and 1–0 at home. A clean sheet was a positive, and a lot of good performances as well.”

The British Basketball Federation says it will enter liquidation as the crisis engulfing the sport in the UK continues.

A statement from the BBF said it had ceased to trade “due to a significant and unanticipated reduction in income” and “unforeseen expenditure resulting in the company’s inability to meet its liabilities”.

It has been reported, external the BBF’s financial position had been affected by legal costs incurred during its battle with Super League Basketball (SLB).

In April, the BBF awarded a 15-year licence to run a new professional men’s competition – the Great Britain Basketball League – to GBB League Ltd (GBBL).

The BBF said GBBL, a consortium led by American businessman Marshall Glickman, would provide £15m funding in the first two years.

However, the existing nine SLB clubs claimed the tender process run by the governing body was “illegal and unjust” and refused to join the new league.

A week ago SLB reached an agreement with basketball’s world governing body Fiba to oversee the top-tier men’s competition in Great Britain.

Last month basketball’s world governing body Fiba suspended the BBF over governance issues.

The BBF statement added that the immediate priority was for domestic basketball stakeholders to work with Fiba “to ensure the ongoing stability and security of the Great Britain national teams”, including forthcoming Fiba competitions.

Fiba, which set up a taskforce in August to investigate regulatory non-compliance within British basketball, said it will continue to support the BBF to “restore its operations and secure its position as the basketball governing body in Great Britain”.

UK Sport said: “We have taken robust steps throughout this period of uncertainty to safeguard public funds and to help enable GB teams to continue to compete.

“We will now work closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the basketball community to establish a way forward for the sport.”

A spokesperson for GBBL told BBC Sport it was “working with its legal counsel to evaluate its options” relating to the status of the licence it was awarded by the BBF.

“In accordance with the terms of the licence, significant sums of money have been paid to the BBF and this is of grave concern to GBBL,” they added.

Tigray was the centre of a devastating two-year war that pitted the TPLF against Ethiopia’s federal army.

Ethiopia’s Afar region has accused forces from neighbouring Tigray of crossing into its territory, seizing several villages and attacking civilians, in what it called a breach of the 2022 peace deal that ended the war in northern Ethiopia.

Between 2020 and 2022, Tigray was the centre of a devastating two-year war that pitted the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) against Ethiopia’s federal army and left at least 600,000 people dead, according to the African Union.

In a statement released late on Wednesday, Afar authorities said TPLF fighters “entered Afar territory by force today”.

The group, which governs the Tigray region, was accused of “controlling six villages and bombing civilians with mortars”. Officials did not provide details on casualties.

“The TPLF learns nothing from its mistakes,” the Afar administration said, condemning what it described as “acts of terror”.

The conflict earlier this decade also spread into neighbouring Ethiopian regions, including Afar, whose forces fought alongside federal troops.

According to Afar’s latest statement, Tigrayan forces attacked the Megale district in the northwest of the region “with heavy weapons fire on civilian herders”.

The authorities warned that if the TPLF “does not immediately cease its actions, the Afar Regional Administration will assume its defensive duty to protect itself against any external attack”.

The renewed fighting, they said, “openly destroys the Pretoria peace agreement”, referring to the deal signed in November 2022 between Ethiopia’s federal government and Tigrayan leaders, which ended two years of bloodshed.

While the fragile peace had largely held, tensions between Addis Ababa and the TPLF have deepened in recent months. The party, which dominated Ethiopian politics from 1991 to 2018, was officially removed from the country’s list of political parties in May amid internal divisions and growing mistrust from the federal government.

Federal officials have also accused the TPLF of re-establishing ties with neighbouring Eritrea, a country with a long and uneasy history with Ethiopia. Eritrea, once an Italian colony and later an Ethiopian province, fought a bloody independence war before gaining statehood in 1993.

A subsequent border war between the two nations from 1998 to 2000 killed tens of thousands. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, he signed a landmark peace deal with Eritrea, but relations have soured again since the end of the Tigray conflict.