England show promise at world team championships despite early exit

Connor Green’s five-game stand against Liang Jingkun was the clearest sign that England were not simply overwhelmed at London 2026. It also captured Gavin Evans’s central verdict: there was enough in the campaign to feel encouraged, but not enough yet to claim England are close to the sport’s top tier.

The men’s side won only once, beating Moldova 3-1 in the last-32 stage at OVO Arena Wembley before advancing to the round of 16 and then losing to Brazil. The women exited at the same stage, beaten 3-1 by Ukraine. For Evans, those results mattered, but so did the details inside them, because England showed they could make elite opponents work harder than the scorelines suggested.

Green, 19, has been identified as one of England’s fast-rising senior players, and his performance against China underlined why. China opened with a straight-games win over England, but Liang was forced into a scrappy five-game battle before edging Green 11-9 in the decider. That kind of resistance against a nation that sits at the summit of the sport is exactly the sort of evidence England need if they are to build a stronger next cycle, because it shows the gap is real without being immovable.

Tin-Tin Ho also pushed hard in tight matches against Annett Kaufmann of Germany and Jia Nan Yuan of France, another sign that England’s best players can create discomfort against higher-ranked opposition even when the result does not swing their way. In a tournament where 19 of the top 20 men and most of the top 20 women in the world rankings travelled to London, those near misses carried more weight than they might in a weaker field.

That strength of opposition was part of what made London 2026 such a severe test. The event ran from 28 April to 10 May across the Copper Box Arena and OVO Arena Wembley, 100 years after London first hosted the World Championships in 1926. With 64 men’s teams and 64 women’s teams in the draw, the centenary setting gave England a home stage and a brutal measuring stick at the same time.

Evans’s wider message was one of trajectory. The GB pathway is still aimed at delivering a first-ever Olympic table tennis medal for Great Britain, and London suggested the pipeline has players capable of stretching top nations in patches. The next step is turning those patches into more wins, because promise alone will not be enough when the next world-team cycle begins.