Chris Doran was the winner as table tennis players made light of the bad weather to ensure the BATTS Super Series tournament was a success.

Despite snow making travelling difficult, 41 out of the 48 entrants made it to the venue in Harlow.

Doran beat the No 2 seed Ismaila Akindiya in the final to take the £500 top prize and there were some exciting matches on the way.

The quarter-finals of the main knockout yielded the most exciting matches, with three of the four quarters very close indeed: Richard Jermyn almost toppled Akindiya, while Tony Halling played superbly to almost beat the No 3 seed Adeoye Adawale, and the No 4 seed Adam Jepson had a tight and exciting struggle to overcome unseeded Remy Delynen.

In the semis, the two players from Nigeria had a super match. Again, it was looking like a potential upset when Adawale went ahead on games but Akindiya was just too strong in the end. Doran had to move up another gear to overcome Jepson and then went into overdrive in the final to beat Akindiya.

In the Band One singles there were also some excellent performances, topped with a fine victory by BATTS’ Luke Jones, who beat Lee McHugh in the final.

BATTS’ Graham Frankel said:

We certainly had a few challenges during the morning, and I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while we were waiting for those who had the worst delays.  It is unusual for us to leave tables empty at our tournaments, but we feel with hindsight we did the right thing by keeping the original groups intact and leaving some tables to ensure that the latecomers could get into action as quickly as possible.

As usual, we had some tremendous matches, both in the group stages and in the knockouts.  Clearly, everyone forgot about the snow and I began to wonder if people were playing better as a kind of outlet for the frustrations of travel.