Table Tennis England names 13-player squad for European Youth Championships

Table Tennis England has gone with a squad that looks as much like a succession plan as a selection sheet. The 13-player group for the European Youth Championships blends athletes who felt the pressure of London 2026 with domestic champions who earned their place through current form, leaving England with a clear question in Gondomar: is this a team built to chase results now, or one designed to feed the senior pipeline?

Tianer Yu, Ella Pashley and Alyssa Nguyen are the headline names from the London set-up. Yu and Pashley played for England against some of the world’s best players at OVO Arena Wembley during the ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals London 2026 Presented by ACN, while Nguyen was part of the squad and gained valuable experience around the senior environment without taking the table. That mix gives England some proven tournament ballast before the first serve is struck in Portugal.

The event runs from July 10 to 19 in Gondomar, with team competition first and individual events to follow, and the timing matters. Table Tennis England’s selection policy set travel for July 8 and a preparation camp from June 28 to July 5, giving the squad a narrow window to turn domestic success into a European campaign. The selection also shows how strongly England is leaning on in-form age-group champions: Yu is the Under-21 and junior national champion, Nguyen is the Under-17 champion, and the squad also includes Isaac Kingham, Larry Trumpauskas, Max Radiven, Dimitar Dimitrov and Hannah Saunders after their own title-winning runs.

Recent results underline why those names were hard to ignore. Yu won the Mark Bates Ltd Under-21 women’s singles title in May and followed that with her second singles crown of the Junior National Championships weekend. Trumpauskas took the junior boys’ singles, while Nguyen and Catherine Lv claimed the girls’ doubles title together. Those wins matter because England is not merely stocking up for the future; it is selecting players who are already delivering under pressure.

The coaching structure reflects the same split between immediate ambition and long-term development. Paul Drinkhall will guide the junior boys, Antony Constantinou the junior girls, Ben Barlow the cadet boys and Charlotte Carey the cadet girls. Gavin Evans, Table Tennis England’s Director of Performance Development, said the selectors had picked the best team available, with the short-term aim of keeping the boys in the top category and moving the girls up, while the longer view is to build toward medals in coming years.

That is no small task. England’s junior boys finished 17th last year and earned promotion to the top tier, the cadet boys were equal 13th, and the girls’ teams finished equal 25th and remain in the second tier. Nguyen already knows how unforgiving this competition can be, having been in England’s cadet girls team in 2025 when they finished third in their group, beat Hungary in a play-off and then lost to Portugal in the next stage. With medals spread across 12 nations in last year’s team events, the standard in Gondomar will be unforgiving again, and England’s latest squad has been built to meet it.