Ireland denies an antisemitism problem its soccer team needed a vote and black armbands to settle.

…(cont) The same day, in the same country, a different institution was not so sure. Ireland's national soccer team, under manager Heimir Hallgrimsson, was working through selection issues that came down to a vote: whether to play the fixture at all. This is not a routine team meeting.

The players voted to go ahead. But "go ahead" came with a condition attached, the kind of condition a team doesn't attach to a game it considers ordinary. Every player would wear a black armband, described in their own words as being worn "in recognition of all lives lost" in Gaza. The match was played, on schedule, with the armbands on.

Line those two Sunday events up next to each other and you get the whole story without adding a word to either one. A head of government says the country has no antisemitism problem. His own national team, that same day, cannot agree among itself whether to take the field against Israel without first taking a vote and then marking its sleeves for the dead in Gaza. One of those is a denial. The other is a count of hands. The count is the one that had to happen before anyone could take the pitch.

Nobody in this story is accused of anything. The prime minister answered a question he was asked. The players answered one nobody had to ask them, because they asked it of themselves. That's the tell. When the people closest to the fixture feel the need to vote on playing it, and then to wear something for the dead once they've decided to, the flat denial issued the same morning starts to look less like an assessment and more like a hope.