A quartet of English players head to the WTT China Smash this week in good heart following recent successes.

Tom Jarvis, Connor Green, Liam Pitchford and Tin-Tin Ho are all competing at the event in Beijing, which starts on Thursday.

Waiting for them is a stellar ‘cast-list’ which is headed by respective men’s and women’s world No 1s, Wang Chuqin and Wang Manyu.

In fact, all the top 10 men in the world are on duty, with only Zhu Yuling from the women’s top 10 not competing.

Jarvis, currently ranked 46, is the only English player seeded into the main draw, with Pitchford, Green and Ho all starting in the qualifiers. Jarvis & Green are in the Men’s Doubles competition, while Green & Ho are in the Mixed.

Green and Ho are on the rise as a pair, having won WTT Feeder Dusseldorf in March and reached two WTT finals since then, including at WTT Feeder Linz in Austria at the weekend.

Green also reached the Men’s Doubles final in Linz, alongside Mateusz Zalewski, as well as getting to the singles quarter-finals – which moved him up 10 places to No 112 in the world rankings.

Pitchford and Jarvis have also shown good form in the Bundesliga in the last few days, including when their respective teams – Grenzau and Grünwettersbach, met on Friday.

They did not play each other but won their individual matches – Jarvis beating Maciej Kubik and Pitchford (pictured top of page) recording a double as he saw off Tiago Apolonia in three games and Ricardo Walther in four, setting the platform for Grenzau’s 3-2 victory.

It made it four wins out of four matches for Pitchford, who made his debut earlier in the week, when he set up another 3-2 win for Grenazu, this time against Bad Königshofen. Pitchford told the Bundesliga website: “It’s surreal. I didn’t expect to play this well.”

As well as the English contingent competing at the Smash, Wales’ Anna Hursey (WR 36) is also there. She is seeded into the main draw of the Women’s Singles and partners Shi Xunyao of China, the world No 17, in the Women’s Doubles.

Shi may be familiar to English fans as she won the Women’s Doubles at WTT Star Contender London last year, alongside compatriot Zhang Xiangyu.

Anna said: “I’m very excited about the doubles with Shi Xunyao. She’s an amazing player so hopefully we can do well together, and we can also just have a bit of fun.”

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