Bayley and Davies Lead GB Squad to France as World Championships Preparation Steps Up

There is a sound I only hear in table tennis halls built for para athletes. It is the sound of the ball bouncing on a table in a space so quiet you can hear the breathing of the person sitting in the third row. I sat in one such hall in Sheffield a few years ago, while the organizers were still setting up microphones, and all I managed to write in my notebook was a single line: in here, the human being appears before the sport. That is why I read the latest announcement from Table Tennis England about the British para squad with an attention quite different from how I read a transfer news item. They are not boasting about a signing. They are not promising a medal. They are simply saying that a group of twelve athletes will travel to France in September, and I see in that an entire story about how people prepare for things they cannot control. Will Bayley, world champion, and Rob Davies, European champion, are the first two names mentioned. Jack Hunter-Spivey, Bly Twomey, Billy Shilton, along with a list of other athletes spanning classes 1 through 9, will travel together to Yvelines for the ITTF World Para Elite, an event running from September 12 to 16. Then, in November, the whole squad will head to Thailand for the World Para Championships. Between those two markers lies a period I have always considered the most important in any sporting cycle: the transition from training to competition, when everything has been decided and yet nothing has been decided at all. I once hosted a live broadcast for a major table tennis event in Saigon, and what I learned from those sessions was not how to read a scoreline. It was how to recognize what state a national team is in. A well-prepared team has its own particular kind of silence. They do not laugh much at press conferences. They talk about process. And they always mention some intermediate event as though it were a mandatory stepping stone rather than a goal. The Table Tennis England announcement reads exactly that way. Let us start with the number. Twelve athletes. That is not a random figure. In para table tennis, a national squad is built around competitive classes, and the number of people selected reflects both ambition and resource constraints. Each class is a classification system based on functional impairment, where class 1 represents the most severe impairment and higher classes correspond to greater mobility. Outsiders look at this list and see only a string of names. Professionals look at it and see a risk map. How many athletes do you have in each class? Which class has depth, which has only one person? If that person is injured, where does the structure collapse? Rob Davies competes in class 1, the most severe class, where athletes play from wheelchairs with minimal trunk control. He is a European champion. Will Bayley competes in class 7, a class where he has reached the world summit. Bly Twomey, one of the younger names on the list, is also in class 7. Billy Shilton is in class 8. Jack Hunter-Spivey is in class 5. Simply placing these names side by side reveals a strategic problem every federation must confront: do you allocate resources to those who have proven themselves, or to those who might prove themselves over the next four years? I once told a colleague that every player is a universe of their own, and that I am merely borrowing their glasses to watch the match. That statement is truest in para table tennis. Because here, technique cannot be separated from the body in the way we usually imagine. An upward topspin stroke in ordinary table tennis is the result of a force chain running from the feet, through the hips, through the shoulders, through the wrist. In class 1, that chain is rewritten entirely. Athletes must build a substitute system, where the shoulders and forearms carry most of the work, and where rotating the wheelchair becomes a genuine tactical skill. You cannot evaluate Rob Davies by the same yardstick you use for a standing player. You have to learn to see again. Shaun Marples, the team's Interim Performance Director, says the trip to France is a chance for athletes to gain valuable match practice and improve their world ranking and seeding ahead of the World Championships. I read that sentence three times. It sounds bureaucratic, but inside it lies an entire philosophy. The word "interim" deserves attention. In sports management, an interim title usually means the organization is waiting for a particular outcome before making a final decision. Here, that outcome is almost certainly the World Championships in Thailand in November. Marples is working within a term that can be measured, and that affects how he makes decisions. A person in an interim position tends to be more cautious, or conversely, bolder. There is no way to know in advance. But I always pay attention to titles like that, because they are small cracks in the wall that history will later crawl through. The training camp in Sheffield is mentioned with positive feedback. This is a detail I want to linger on a little longer, because training camps are often treated as filler in a news item. But for para table tennis, a training camp has a much more specific function than simply physical conditioning. It is where athletes from different classes, with different physical limitations, learn to train alongside one another. It is where a class 7 player can serve as a partner for a class 5 player, creating ball trajectories no one else can produce. And it is also where team atmosphere is built, something no metric can measure yet which decides a great deal at a multi-day centralized event. I have witnessed a national team disintegrate not for lack of talent, but for lack of a proper training camp. They arrived at the event as individuals wearing the same color shirt. And when pressure came, they dissolved. In table tennis, where every point is a short battle of wits, the feeling of belonging to a group can be the difference between staying calm at 9-9 and letting go. The Sheffield camp, therefore, is not a minor detail. It is the mental infrastructure of the entire campaign. The ITTF World Para Elite event in Yvelines sits within the ITTF's elite series for para table tennis. The important thing to understand is that the points system of this series differs from that of the World Championships. A regional elite event may award fewer points, but for athletes sitting on the boundary between two seeding groups, those few points can change their entire draw at the World Championships. In table tennis, where avoiding a difficult opponent in the quarterfinals can be the difference between stopping there and reaching the final, this is no small matter. I have watched enough tournaments to know that a better seeding position is often worth the equivalent of an extra month of training. But there is one thing press releases never say. A preparation event is not only an opportunity to improve ranking. It is also a test whose results can be ignored technically but cannot be ignored psychologically. The athletes will travel to France, and there they will face opponents they may meet again in Thailand. Those matches will create memories. If Bayley wins, he will enter the World Championships with a foothold. If he loses, he will enter with a question. No match is neutral. I believe that absolutely. Let us speak about Will Bayley more specifically. He is world champion in class 7, and that places him in a particular position within the squad structure. When you are a champion, every tournament you enter carries an invisible pressure: you are no longer permitted to lose in an ordinary way. Every defeat becomes a story about decline rather than about an opponent playing better. I have seen the best athletes of my acquaintance struggle not with technique, but with accepting that they might lose. That is a very particular kind of loneliness that belongs to those at the top. At Bayley's age, and with a career that has passed many milestones, the question is no longer whether he can play. The question is what he still wants to play for. I am 31, and I once wrote a line I still keep: at 31, I no longer believe in comebacks; I believe in continuations. I think that line applies to many athletes at this stage of their careers. A comeback implies you left and need to return. A continuation implies you never left, and each tournament is merely the next chapter. Bayley, as champion, is in the second state. Rob Davies is different. He is a European champion, a title that is no small thing, but it sits at a different level from a world championship. For a class 1 athlete, playing from a wheelchair imposes entirely different technical requirements. I once spent an entire afternoon watching a class 1 athlete practice serves, and what astonished me was not the spin on the ball, but how he adjusted his wheelchair position between serves to create a different approach angle. That is a cognitive process occurring within two to three seconds, and it demands a spatial map in the mind that ordinary people never need to build. When you talk about tactics in para table tennis class 1, you are talking about a kind of spatial intelligence that most coaches are not trained to read. That is why I am always slightly uncomfortable when someone says para table tennis is "table tennis with adjustments." It is not. It is a sport with its own rule system, its own classification system, and its own tactical system, built to maximize fairness among athletes with different levels of functional impairment. Saying it is "table tennis with adjustments" is like saying wheelchair basketball is "basketball with wheels." You are technically correct and entirely wrong in spirit. Jack Hunter-Spivey, in class 5, brings a different story to the squad. In this class, the level of functional impairment allows athletes greater mobility than in class 1 or 2, but still requires significant adjustments in posture and movement. This is often a highly competitive class, and therefore the class where a few ranking points can make the greatest difference in seeding position. I have always regarded mid-range class athletes like Hunter-Spivey as the most underrated people in news reports, because they have no glamorous titles to quote, yet they are the ones who hold the team's point structure steady. Then there is Bly Twomey. This is the name I want to give the most attention to, because she represents what every sports federation worries about: the future. In class 7, the same class as Bayley, Twomey is in the process of transitioning from a young talent into a senior athlete. This is the most dangerous phase in anyone's career. Not because the technique is insufficient, but because matches at the highest level demand a kind of nerve that can only be learned by losing. A young talent needs roughly two years of continuous international competition to build a sufficiently thick psychological shell. During that period, results are very hard to predict. That is why including Twomey on the France list is not a sentimental decision. It is an investment. Billy Shilton, in class 8, is a similar case at a different stage. In class 8, the level of functional impairment is lower, and therefore the pace of the match is closer to standing table tennis. This makes development in class 8 require a skill set closer to ordinary table tennis standards, but it also makes competition more brutal. I regard Shilton as one of the best indicators for measuring the true depth of the British squad. If he progresses over the next two years, it is a sign that the development system is working. If he stagnates, it is a sign that there is a bottleneck somewhere between youth level and senior level. Now let us speak about what I really want to say, and what I think anyone reading this news item should ask themselves. An announcement about a squad and a schedule tells us nothing about technique. But it tells us a great deal about the power structure of a federation. When a federation reports on a squad heading to a World Championships, it is doing three things at once. It is informing fans. It is sending a signal to sponsors and funding bodies. And it is creating a public record that can later be used to judge itself. In Britain, para table tennis receives support from UK Sport, the body that funds high-performance sport. This funding works in cycles, and every investment is tied to medal expectations. That means a positive preparation announcement is not merely good news for fans. It is part of a quiet negotiation over the next cycle's budget. I am always surprised by how few people read sports news through this lens, because it explains a great deal about why a federation says one thing and not another. And here is the counterintuitive angle I want to put on the table. We often praise a squad for having many big names. But in high-performance sport, having two or three older stars plus a group of unproven young athletes is not a healthy structure. It is a structure with concentrated risk. If both Bayley and Davies perform well in Thailand, the story will be a success story. If one of them is injured before the event, the entire medal expectation of the squad can collapse in a moment, because there is no one behind them mature enough to carry the burden. I have watched this happen to many squads, across many sports, and it always unfolds according to the same script: everyone is surprised, yet no one is truly surprised. Bringing Twomey and Shilton to France is a step in the right direction to reduce this risk. But it is only the first step. To convert a young talent into an athlete capable of competing in the knockout rounds of a World Championships, you need roughly three to four years of continuous international competition, with at least two major-event cycles. There is no way to shorten that process, because it is not merely a technical matter. It is a matter of lived experience in a high-pressure environment. I believe an athlete only truly matures after losing an important match they knew they could win. No training camp can simulate that feeling. There is one detail in the release I think deserves emphasis, even though it may seem small. The France event runs from September 12 to 16, and the World Championships take place in November. The gap between the two events is roughly seven to eight weeks. In the sports training cycle, this is a very specific window. It is long enough to recover from the matches in France, but not long enough to build a new physical foundation. That means what the British squad gains in France will be what they take to Thailand, plus a little adjustment. There is no opportunity to start over. This is why I have always regarded preparation events as more important than their outward appearance suggests. One more point on timing: staging a European elite event in September, immediately before a World Championships in Southeast Asia in November, raises a question about time-zone adaptation and competitive conditions. The British squad will have to travel from France, return to Britain, then go to Thailand. That is two environmental changes within two months. For para athletes, these changes can affect very specific physical factors, from circadian rhythm to issues related to prolonged sitting posture on flights. I do not see the release mentioning this, and I consider it an omission. A good preparation plan does not only speak of matches. It speaks of logistics. I once hosted a live broadcast and mispronounced the name of an international athlete three times in the first half. I remember the feeling so vividly that I still keep my pronunciation notebook from that time. There is one line I wrote after that event and it remains true to this day: a mistake on live broadcast does not kill the commentator; it merely strips away the veneer. I think the same is true of sports federations. When everything goes according to plan, you never find out how an organization really operates. You only find out when there is an injury, a delay, a surprising result. That is when the veneer is stripped away and you see the real structure. For the British squad, that real structure will be tested in November. But it will also be tested in part in September, in France, in a competitive space that almost no one in Vietnam follows. I have always felt a slight injustice in how sports media operates. What happens on the big stage gets recorded. What happens backstage does not. But backstage is where everything is actually decided. Let us speak about class 1 once more, because I think this is the class the general fan understands least. In para table tennis class 1, athletes play from wheelchairs and have moderate to severe impairment affecting the limbs. This means many movements we take for granted in table tennis, such as rotating the body to generate power, must be replaced by other mechanisms. Athletes must learn to use body weight in very limited ways, and compensate with adjustments to racket angle and contact timing. This creates a very distinctive type of match, where spatial chess dominates over power. Rob Davies, as European champion, is one of the most adept practitioners of this type of match, and I wish more people could watch him play. I hold a belief I know is unpopular: that para table tennis classes 1 and 2 are among the most cognitively demanding sports of all combat sports. Not because they are more complex than standing table tennis, but because they require the player to build a new cognitive system from scratch. When mobility is limited, every choice becomes more expensive. You cannot fix a mistake with speed. You must fix it with thought. It is a purely intellectual form of sport, and I think it deserves far more recognition. But let us return to the central question. What makes a successful preparation campaign for the British squad? There are three factors I think matter most, and I will list them in descending order of importance, even though I know that in a conventional sports analysis, people often reverse this order. First, and most important: health. In para table tennis, health is not merely the ability to compete. It is the ability to maintain a certain level of stability across many consecutive days, in an environment where the body has already endured more than that of an ordinary athlete. Para athletes often carry higher injury risk due to their underlying conditions, and those injuries may not be the injuries we usually see in sport. They may be issues of posture, of pressure on contact points with the wheelchair, of prolonged strains with no obvious signs. Managing these factors requires a medical team with deep knowledge of para table tennis, and that is not always available. Second: adaptability. An event in France and an event in Thailand demand different adjustments in terms of opponents, playing conditions, and environment. A squad that can adapt quickly has a major advantage in the opening days of a World Championships, when group-stage matches are often decided by who finds their rhythm faster. Third: psychology. And this, I think, is the factor that news reports most often overlook. At a two-week centralized event, with multiple matches per day, psychology is not an abstract factor. It is a concrete resource, one that can be depleted and must be managed. I have seen athletes at the technical peak who could not maintain concentration through the fifth day of a tournament. This is what training camps try to address, though I am not sure they always succeed. Now I want to talk about an aspect I believe is undervalued in all discussions of para table tennis: the relationship between athletes on the same squad but in different classes. To some extent, they are teammates. But to another extent, they are pursuing very different goals, with different resources, and sometimes with underlying conflicts of interest. A federation with a limited budget must decide how much to allocate to supporting a class 7 athlete at their peak, and how much to developing a class 5 athlete in an early phase. This is not an easy decision, and it is rarely made publicly. But it affects everything, from competition schedules to the selection of training partners. I think the British squad is at an interesting moment in this cycle. They have two older champions, a group of mid-career athletes at or near their peak, and a few young talents waiting for their chance. This is a structure that can work well if everything goes according to plan, but can also run into trouble if there is an unexpected variable. And in sport, unexpected variables are the rule, not the exception. I once said that the empty stadium of 2026 taught me that noise is not the same as cheering. That line is true of para table tennis in a particular way. Para events often take place in smaller spaces, with fewer spectators, and with an atmosphere quite different from the big events of standing table tennis. But that emptiness does not mean less significance. In a way, it means more, because it forces you to focus on what is actually happening on the table, rather than what is happening around it. When there is no crowd to please, every point becomes a pure dialogue between two people. What I want to see at the France event is not results. Results will come and go. What I want to see is how the young athletes handle difficult moments. I want to see how Bly Twomey reacts when she falls behind in a set. I want to see what Billy Shilton does when he loses an important service point. Those moments do not appear in the results table, but they are the true indicators of an athlete's potential. I learned this after many years of watching sport: what you see during a match is often less important than what you see between matches. There is one thing I have always been curious about regarding national sports teams: they often talk about building a "culture." It is a word that is used a great deal and defined very little. But in para table tennis, I think culture has a more concrete meaning. It is how a squad treats athletes with different levels of functional impairment. It is whether a class 1 athlete is treated equally to a class 8 athlete, not only in resources but in attention. I have seen squads where athletes in lower classes felt like second-class citizens within their own team. That is a problem few speak about, but it directly affects performance. In the case of the British squad, I have no specific information on this issue. But I will pay attention to how they present their athletes. In the release, Bayley and Davies are mentioned first, which is logical since they have the highest achievements. But a truly healthy squad is one where every member feels their role matters. And that can only be built through action, not through statements. Let me say something about Shaun Marples, the Interim Performance Director. I think this position is one of the hardest in sports management. You are responsible for results, but you do not have full authority to build a long-term plan. You must make decisions that can affect athletes' careers, while you yourself do not know how long you will hold the position. This is a situation that can lead to two types of behavior: either excessive caution, or excessive boldness. Both can be harmful. But I also think a person in an interim position can have an advantage. They can make decisions that someone in a permanent position would avoid, because they do not have to worry about maintaining a long-term image. If Marples decides to take more young athletes to France, that might be a decision someone in a permanent position would not make. I do not know whether he will, but the presence of Twomey and Shilton on the list is a good sign. Now I want to broaden the view beyond the British squad, because para table tennis is a global sport, and any analysis that focuses on only one squad risks missing the bigger picture. In para table tennis, China is a dominant power, especially in the lower classes. Germany, Japan, and several other European nations also have strong squads. Britain, in this context, is one of the most successful non-Asian squads, particularly in classes 1 and 7. This means that when the British squad arrives in Thailand in November, they will face opponents they have met many times before. In situations like this, head-to-head history becomes an important psychological factor. I have seen athletes with better technique lose to an opponent they had lost to many times before, simply because the memory of those defeats created an invisible barrier. This is what coaches call a "matchup mental problem," and it is one of the hardest problems in sport to solve. You cannot train your way out of it. You can only get past it by actually beating that opponent in a real match. So when I think about the significance of the France event, I think of it as an opportunity for the British athletes to face some of their potential opponents in a lower-pressure environment than the World Championships. If an athlete can win in France, that is a psychological foothold they can carry to Thailand. This is a reasonable strategy, though not a guarantee. There is one thing I want to emphasize, and I think it matters in the context of modern sport. We live in an age of data abundance, and there is a tendency to quantify everything. In table tennis, we can measure ball speed, spin rate, service point win rates, and countless other metrics. But there are things data cannot measure, and I think those are the most important things in para table tennis. You cannot measure the courage required for a class 1 athlete to keep competing at the highest level after years of enduring physical limitations. You cannot measure the patience of a young athlete waiting years for an international appearance. These things do not appear in statistics, but they are decisive factors. I remember an evening in Saigon when I sat rewatching a para table tennis match on my computer. It was a match I had seen before, and I knew the result. But I watched it again. And on the second viewing, I noticed something I had missed the first time: the silence between two points. It is a period lasting only a few seconds, when the athletes prepare for the next point. In that silence, anything can happen. I thought about it a great deal afterwards, and I wrote a line I still keep in my notebook: transfers are a symphony of silences, every falling number resounding. That line was originally written about football, but I think it applies to every sport. The silences between points are where the match is truly decided. For the British squad, the biggest silence in this cycle is the period between September and November. It is the period during which they will have to prepare mentally for what is coming, while maintaining focus on what is happening. This is a difficult problem, and there is no perfect solution. I think there is a lesson from football that can apply here. In football, pre-season friendly tours are often criticized for turning clubs into circuses, where ticket sales and marketing matter more than genuine physical preparation. The same can happen in table tennis, on a smaller scale. A preparation event can become a marketing event if it is not organized properly. But in the case of the ITTF World Para Elite, I think it is an event with a clear purpose. It is not a friendly tour created to sell tickets. It is a tournament with meaning in the ranking system, and that makes it different. Let me end with a thought about the meaning of sport, and about why I think news items like this matter, even when they contain none of the technical information I usually seek. Over many years working in this industry, I have learned that sport is not only about what happens on the field of play. It is about what happens around it, about people, about stories, about power structures, and about hopes. A news item about a squad heading to a tournament is a cross-section of all of that. I once wrote for a personal blog with twelve views, and I learned something I will never forget: when I wrote for no one, I learned to love the game without applause. That is an important lesson, and it has stayed with me to this day. Because in sport, as in writing, the most important thing is not how many people follow you. The most important thing is whether you are following the right thing. And for the British para table tennis squad, the right thing to follow over the next few months is not the number of medals they win. It is how they build a squad capable of surviving across multiple cycles, not just one. That is a far more difficult question, and the answer will not come from a tournament in France or a World Championships in Thailand. It will come from hundreds of small decisions, made by people we rarely see, in silences we rarely notice. There is one question I always ask myself when I read a sports news item: if I could remember only one detail, what would it be? With this one, the detail is the seven-week gap between the two events. Seven weeks to prepare, to adjust, to hope, and to accept that nothing is guaranteed. In those seven weeks, everything can change, or nothing can change. That is the nature of sport, and that is why we keep watching.