How to win a Gold Medal without touching your bat!

Kidlington Forum Table TTC SBL 2024-25

In Kidlington Forum’s third season in the Senior British Clubs League (formerly the Senior British League), the team was placed in Division C8 hosted by London Academy. Kidlington’s journey in the British League has been a steady progression from the start with 3rd place in their first season, 2nd last year and now the team has landed the title to win Division C8, narrowly beating Waterside at the death in a nail-biting finish to earn promotion to the B division for next season! A remarkable journey thus far for a comparatively small (but growing) club – to win a British League division within three years of first entry!

By all accounts, this seems to have been a particularly strong C-division with strong strength in depth across the whole division – typified by the fact that 4 of the 8 teams in the division were in strong contention for the title before the final weekend! This was not a saunter through the park but rather a dog-fight from beginning to end and it is testament to the strength of the whole squad, ability to bounce back and make adjustments that Kidlington was able to come out on top – defeating Waterside on a narrow countback at the death as can be seen in the final results table:

The playing squad for the whole season in ranking order is given here :

• James Rule

• Kiarash Shaddel

• Elson Costa

• Alexander Sheppard

• Karl Bushell

• Isaac Mak

• Edward Lush

• Jack Shardlow

• Marius Matei

• Captain: Farshad Shaddel – unable to play this season due to injury

This has been an incredibly hard-fought season and the photo finish illustrates that this really was a team effort with all squad members chipping in to the final victory – and illustrates the importance of the crucial marginal gains on the table achieved through training and from the system at club level: none more important than the focus on the regular practice of doubles leading to an astonishing 13 doubles wins out of 14 across the whole season! The most pleasing thing about this victory however was that this was achieved on the back of the “Kidlington way” without compromising on our bedrock principles of fairness, team spirit and training in an efficient and focused way.

Congratulations to all of the players and to Kidlington Forum TTC on this success! Special additional thanks to Karl Bushell and the whole KFTTC Committee and Neil Hurford for all their support from the start and the whole squad and club looks forward to future challenges in the B-division next season!

Farshad Shaddel 

Kidlington Forum TTC Chair & SBL Captain