The Czech Cadet and Junior Open provided a number of positives from the young English players with the cadet players taking up the mantle in search of international accolades.
Although there was not the big win like Tin-Tin Ho’s in Portugal there was a strength across the board that resulted in a number of players catching the eye.
Top of the list is cadet boys player Daniel Lawrence who, despite his lack of international experience, had an excellent tournament to reach both the singles main draw and the doubles semi-final alongside the talented Helshan Weerasinghe.
Lawrence recovered from a 3-0 first match defeat to Poland’s Aleksander Werecki to record victories over both Gabor Bohm (HUN) and Martin Vitovec (CZE) in order to reach round one. There he met Hong Kong’s Hung Ka Tak (the eventual winner) who proved too strong but it was still a great achievement for Daniel.
There was more to follow though when he joined up with Weerasinghe, who earlier steamrolled his way into the singles main draw with three 3-0 wins before falling to Poland’s Adrian Dugdiel, as they set the doubles stage alight.
Despite losing all three doubles matches when playing in the team event, they clicked in the doubles to reach the semi-final where they were finally knocked-out by the impressive German pair of Dennis Klein and Leonard Suss.
In the cadet girls competition Tin-Tin Ho progressed to the last 16 but didn’t manage to hit the heights of Portugal as she fell short against her German opponent Alena Lemmer.
The junior players didn’t experience as much success as the cadets but there were some top performances including Vicky Smith, who managed to progress into the main draw of the girls singles before narrowly losing to Thailand’s Tamolwan Khetkuen.
For all the selected English results click the links below or for full tournament details visit the tournament page on the ITTF website.
