Table Tennis: Baggaley's self-belief focused on gold target

English table tennis prodigy can exploit experience gained in Germany and Sweden to lift title

The best most 13-year-olds can hope for as a means of supplementing their pocket-money is probably a bit of weekend car-washing, or falling out of bed at five in the morning to do a paper round. Andrew Baggaley was understandably the envy of his class-mates in Milton Keynes six years ago when, at that tender age, he would miss double maths and more besides to play table tennis in Belgium as Europe's youngest-ever professional.

"The school were really good to me, letting me have a lot of time off for playing tournaments and playing abroad," he said. They cannot have been surprised that at 16 he bagged a few GCSEs ("the main ones"), said his farewells and took off for Germany and a two-year stint with a Bundesliga team, which has just been followed by a year in the Swedish National League. Sweden being the outstanding European nation for table tennis, his game has continued to progress and in March this year he became the youngest English national champion since Chester Barnes 40 years ago, after beating the country's official No 1, Matthew Syed, 4-0.

Should they meet again as the sport makes its debut at the Commonwealth Games this week, it will be another fascinating contrast of personalities, generations and styles. Syed is 31, an Oxbridge graduate with a first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, who has no time for the modern game of serve-and-smash favoured by Baggaley and most other leading players. In an interview in The Independent last week with the novelist and ping-pong aficionado Howard Jacobson, Syed affirmed: "I've always loved the aesthetic of going back and playing from the floor. I like impregnability based on vulnerability."

Baggaley would just settle for the impregnability. With 21 national junior titles behind him – another record – he does not do vulnerability, preferring self-belief that errs on the right side of arrogance: "There's no one I feel I can't beat. My first aim is to get a medal. I've a chance of a gold, if I play to my best and the draw works out well, but I'd have to play fantastically well. And England have a great chance of a medal in the team event, after winning the gold in the Commonwealth championship two years ago. Long-term, my ambition is probably getting medals at the Olympics. And with the right practice and hard work, I can definitely achieve those goals."

He began playing at the age of five, on a table in the back garden, hitting with his mother or anyone else who was prepared to stand at the other end for long enough holding a bat. Another obvious candidate was brother Stephen, 12 years older, and once a highly-ranked England junior who now acts as his coach and adviser. "He had an exceptional temperament even at that age and could play for hour after hour," Stephen remembers. "By that stage I was already a coach and so you think 'we've got something there'." Andrew was also a promising tennis player, who became a county champion in the under-10 age group, but the family took the decision to stick with the sport they knew best.

One or more of them have generally accompanied him abroad, when his other important companion is a guitar. "If you think about table tennis all the time it will get on your nerves a bit, so I play guitar and sing a bit, write my own music a bit," he said. "Then I really do forget about it." Normally he trains for five or six days a week, combining running and skipping with practice for a total of up to six hours a day; in Nottingham with the English national team for the past week, he has concentrated on fine-tuning.

It is an important 10 days for the sport in this country, with the promise of sustained exposure on the BBC and, unlike the Olympics, a real chance of some English success. Table tennis has been ignored by television for so long that Andrew's two appearances on Blue Peter probably mean he has been seen on the box more often than most of his older rivals. In an attempt to make the sport more spectator-friendly (and televisual), the size of the ball has been marginally increased and, more radically, games are now won by the first player to 11, not 21. Neither move is universally popular, but the sport is desperate for greater recognition.

"How can you be passionate, let alone patriotic, about ping-pong?" wrote Jacobson, whose book on the subject, The Mighty Walzer, has been acclaimed as "one of the greatest sporting novels ever". Capacity crowds of 2,000 in Manchester's SportCity may provide an answer when the English come to the table this week.