We recently spent two days following the England squads at the European Team Championships in Sweden. The assignment was driven by Pledge 3 of Table Tennis United, building connection across the table tennis community by developing exciting content for followers, while also helping towards one of the aims of Pledge 4, to grow our owned income, through producing content we can monetise on our channels.

It was also an invaluable learning experience, with England due to host more major events in the coming years, both before and after the 2026 World Team Championships in London.

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The trip to Malmo coincided with the culmination of the team events, which included a gut-wrenching defeat for England’s Junior Boys, who were aiming to gain promotion to the top division of 16 nations.

We spoke to Connor Green and Ralph Pattison about the match, enabling the following reflections.

They say in sport that small margins make a big difference, tipping the balance between triumph and disaster, rewarding or ruining a hard day’s work, bringing glory or despair, all in the blink of an eye.

England’s Junior Boys team experienced the bitter taste of being on the wrong side of those small margins at the European Youth Championships when, having poured their hearts and souls into an attempt to return to the top bracket of 16 nations, they saw their chance snatched away.

It was 11-9 in the deciding game of the deciding match of their tie against Switzerland, something akin to the penalty shootout the two countries had contested at the Euros. England, of course, won that one – but not on this occasion.

A penalty shootout invariably makes a hero, or an unfortunate fall-guy, out of someone. On the table in Malmo, both Ralph Pattison and his opponent Numa Ulrich deserved to be heroes.

If only sport worked that way. Pattison was cast in the role of fall-guy, when he was beaten 11-9 in that fifth game. But he was so nearly the hero, saving five match points across three games to go all the way to the wire.

And spare a thought for Connor Green too, who somehow found a way to chisel out a victory from 2-0 down against Noe Keusch to make the overall match score 2-2 and give Pattison the chance of clinching victory for England.

What impact does losing a high-stakes match in such dramatic circumstances have on a young athlete?

Green won the second and fourth matches, to bring England level after defeats for Pattison in match 1 and Ben Piggott in match 3.

His second match saw him recover a 2-0 deficit to defeat Keusch 3-2 (11-13, 8-11, 11-7, 11-5, 11-7).

Connor said: “I never gave up but, like everyone does, I started having feelings that ‘okay, it’s not going how I want it to and it’s going to be really tough to try and turn this around’. I still thought it was possible, just it’s going to be really hard.

“I managed to find a few good serves, then I started finding my game a bit more, managed to play my backhand and come back into it.

“The fifth is the fifth – it’s just whoever wants it more often than not, or whoever the universe decides going to win on the day. I felt like I’m really happy with how I played in the fifth and managed to stay calm. I was super happy to win the moment and I actually showed it. I was so relieved and happy for the team that we were still in it and I could put the team in a position to try and win it as well.

“And then Ralph played a really good match, I thought, and it just slipped away again – nine in the fifth, you can’t really get much closer.

“The team was pretty deflated afterwards, I’m not going to lie, because we just played for three-and-a-half hours. It was a crazy-long match and it feels like you get nothing out of it at the end. And for us as well, the tournament was kind of over, even though we had another match the next day. Our goal was to try and get in the top half and we didn’t make it happen, so that wasn’t easy.”

That Pattison match saw him recover from 10-8 down to win 12-10 in both the third and fourth games against Ulrich, and he saved another match point at 8-10 in the fifth, before finally losing out 3-2 (11-8, 11-8, 10-12, 10-12, 11-9).

Ralph said: “I was the one who lost the deciding match, so personally I’m upset with that. But the team was fighting all the way through every match and everyone was giving it their best shot.

“I just take the positives and forget about the negatives for now – I just want to be positive for the singles competition – and then when I back home training, I’ll try to remember the negatives, which I’ll work on. But for the singles it’s a new tournament and a fresh new mindset and go again.”

England were beaten 3-2 by Norway in their final match, to end in a share of 23rd position. Switzerland, incidentally, were dismantled 3-0 by Turkey in the first play-off for 17th place – perhaps they too had been left drained by the 9pm finish, followed by a 9am start the next day?