The draw for the Under-21 events at the PG Mutual National Championships has been released – and the rest of the competitions will be drawn at 11am on Thursday.
Tom Jarvis, who led off England’s 3-0 victory over Bosnia-Herzegovina at the Copper Box Arena on Tuesday night, will start the defence of the men’s title with group matches against Gabriel Achampong and Shayan Siraj.
Helshan Weerasinghe, beaten by Jarvis in the last two finals, is in a group with Sam Mabey, Mitchell Jones and Joe Clark.
Women’s champion Tin-Tin Ho, who was also in action for England on Tuesday night, against Norway, will play Bethany Farnworth, Danielle Kelly and Bhavika Mistry. Maria Tsaptsinos is in the same group as Kate Cheer and Sarah Menghistab.
The Under-21 events start at the Copper Box Arena at 1pm on Thursday and will be played to a completion on the day.
The draw for the rest of the competitions, which begin on Friday, will be held at 11am on Thursday and will be shown live on the Table Tennis England Twitter platform.
The seedings for the men’s and women’s singles are as follows:
Men: Paul Drinkhall, Liam Pitchford, Sam Walker, Tom Jarvis, David McBeath, Chris Doran, Danny Reed, Helshan Weerasinghe.
Women: Tin-Tin Ho, Kelly Sibley, Karina LeFevre, Maria Tsaptsinos, Hannah Hicks, Emily Bolton, Yolanda King, Charlotte Bardsley.
The draw will use the most up to date seedings list from Table Tennis England. This may result in a different order to those from the invitation lists which were drawn from the January rankings.
The change to the draw schedule is to bring it into line with international norms and to ensure that any last-minute player withdrawals do not leave ‘gaps’ in the draw as in previous years.
The programme has been compiled using the January list and so as a result seedings will be different from those published in it.