Saints' sultans of ping miss out on national finals (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Saints' sultans of ping miss out on national finals

9:43am Tuesday 27th January 2009

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THEY dominated the county finals and were a whisker away from progressing in the English Schools Table Tennis Championships.

But, in the end, it was a case of ‘if only’ for St Bedes very own Sultans of Ping.

The Blackburn team were a class apart from every other team in the Lancashire finals and showed they could live with the best in the zonal finals.

The fact that St Bede’s A team beat St Bede’s B to clinch the county under 13s crown underlined the school’s dominance at that level.

And just like those county finals, the zonal finals were also held at St Bede’s which is quickly becoming a centre of excellence for table tennis.

St Bedes were representing Lancashire after sweeping to glory in the county finals back in November.

And the Under 13s team started in similar fashion in the zonal finals up against the best teams from across Merseyside, Cumbria, Great-er Manchester, Cheshire and Shropshire.

The Saints started off with a superb 8-0 win against Dowdales of Cumbria and followed up with a whitewash of Cheshire school Wade Deacon. St Bede’s narrowly lost their last group game to Caldy Grange but the two wins had already booked their place in semi final.

There they were drawn against a very talented Manchester Grammar School side.

And after the closest of battles, it was Manchester Grammar who went through, winning by just four points.

While the overall score was 5-3, two of the matches went all the way to five sets with the deciding sets going 16-14 and 13-11 in favour of the Manchester team.

Had one of those matches gone in favour of St Bede’s, the Blackburn school could have booked a place in the national regional finals.

The team that got so close included Jack Ellison, Marcus Eccles, Oliver Garside-Fox and Ed Rushworth. Once again the did the school proud having helped St Bede’s win the national title for the fourth successive year.

In the final, Caldy Grange beat Manchester Grammar 6-2.

Coach Dave Pilkington was delighted with the achieve-ments of his team.

He said: “The team got off to a superb start to book a place in the semi finals where they came up against an in-form Manchester Grammar School. The margin of defeat was just four points and had we won the two games we narrowly lost then it would have meant a place inteh national finals for St Bede’s “But unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.”

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