England name eight-player squad for Commonwealth Championships with London echo

England have turned to a compact, familiar group for the Commonwealth Championships in Delhi, and the selection carries a clear London 2026 echo. Four players who represented England at the home World Championships will be back in the three-leopards shirt: Connor Green, Tin-Tin Ho, Jasmin Wong and Joseph Hunter.

They will be joined by Shayan Siraj and Ben Piggott on the men’s side, with Anna Green and Mari Baldwin completing the women’s line-up. Carlo Agnello will coach the eight-player squad when the championships run from 27 July to 2 August at Thyagraj Stadium, a meet expected to draw around 35 nations and offer far more than a routine invitational test.

The timing gives the event extra weight. Table tennis has been dropped from the slimmed-down 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, which has been cut to 10 sports, so the championships in Delhi become the sport’s main Commonwealth-stage event this year. That leaves England’s squad with a sharper edge: a chance to turn recent major-event exposure into results and to establish who sits where in the next phase of the programme.

Gavin Evans, Table Tennis England’s director of performance development, framed the squad as both a development step and a medal chase. He pointed to Green and Hunter as younger players the championships can help accelerate, while Ho and Wong should gain valuable big-event matchplay. Evans also said medals are possible for Ho and Green, but stressed the wider aim is to build depth across Britain.

Ho arrives with the strongest Commonwealth record in the group. She won mixed doubles silver with Liam Pitchford at Glasgow 2014 and repeated that result at Gold Coast 2018. She was also part of England’s first Commonwealth Games team medal, bronze in 2018, and later added team silver and singles bronze at the 2019 Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships in Cuttack.

England’s last visit to that championships stage ended with both teams on the podium. In 2019, the women took silver after losing the final to India, while the men also finished runners-up after a 3-2 defeat to India. India swept the titles that year, and the 2026 event in Delhi gives England another chance to measure itself against the host on a bigger Commonwealth stage. The event was announced in New Delhi by Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and the Table Tennis Federation of India, with the Delhi government and TTFI set to organise it jointly.