Basketball: Officials face stormy meeting

While domestic basketball retreats into the American-dominated BBL competitions this weekend, the reverberations from the dismal performance of the England team in the European Championships and the dire finances of the governing body will echo around Leicestershire Cricket Club today.

Grace Road hosts the annual meeting of England Basketball, which has £1.175m debts and had only £495 "available cash" at the end of its last financial year.

One acting head of an EB committee, watching England lose 97-39 to Italy 10 days ago, predicted today's meeting will be a "bloodbath". EB's officers, committee chairmen and board members face an intense grilling from a disenchanted membership of 800-plus club representatives.

The NBL Conference clubs, the tier below the BBL, want autonomy and EB chairperson Betty Codona could be ousted by Bob Widdecombe, from Plymouth Raiders, who is backed by the NBL clubs.

The highest-profile victim of EB's failure to exist on £1.65m income is the England team and their coach Laszlo Nemeth. He was briefly installed as acting chief executive in the summer – after the suspension and subsequent dismissal of Simon Kirkland – but was suspended, partly for revealing in this paper that he had cancelled officers' credit cards and would "run the association as a dictatorship".