McBeath and Drinkhall: One Player, One Coach, and How Texas Smash Are Rebuilding Themselves

In the deciding game of the third match of the week, the scoreboard froze at 11-10. David McBeath stood behind the table, rotating his wrist slightly, eyes fixed on the ball on the far side. He had just lost the second game 7-11, and now Texas Smash's entire match hinged on the final two points. Three days earlier, he had beaten Marc Duran 2-1 with a single 11-9 game. One day earlier, he had edged Mohamed El Beialy 2-1 with two narrow games. Three singles matches, three trips to a decider, three wins. But what I kept rewatching was not that unbeaten record. It was the fact that almost every game was settled by a two-point margin, and that in a league called Major League Table Tennis, those final two points carry more weight than usual. I sat with the footage close to eleven at night, after Busan's lights came on. There is a detail viewers tend to skip: at 10-10, McBeath does not change his serve. He keeps the same trajectory, the same position, adjusting only the length slightly. Others see the score; I see the decision made a few beats earlier. That steadiness, set beside his repeated loss of middle games, paints a far more interesting picture than a single line of results. To understand why these numbers deserve dissection, one must know what MLTT is. Major League Table Tennis is an independent professional team league in the United States, operating outside the ITTF and WTT systems. That means matches here award no world-ranking points. A player who wins three matches at MLTT will not move up a single place on the international ranking. The league's value lies elsewhere: match intensity, income, and exposure to an audience. Texas Smash is one of the teams in this system, and they have just opened their campaign with two English figures. David McBeath plays. Paul Drinkhall coaches. Both are veteran English internationals, but this time they appear in two different roles within the same team. This is the detail I consider the most important of the whole story, and I will return to it at the end. Week three saw Texas Smash play three matches in three days — a tournament-style schedule, not a home-and-away one. The opponents were Florida Crocs, New York Slice and Atlanta Blazers. The final results: a 7-14 loss, a 14-7 win, a 17-4 win. After that week, Texas sat second in the West behind an unbeaten Bay Area Blasters. Week four begins on 30 October, with opponents Chicago Wind, Carolina Gold Rush and Atlanta Blazers again. The league's player list spans many nationalities: Spanish, Egyptian, American, Korean, Sri Lankan, and several names of Chinese origin. The East-West divisional structure, the clustered scheduling, and the team naming all carry the shape of a US professional-sports model rather than a traditional table-tennis tour. Every system starts from a gap someone left unnoticed — and the gap here is a professional table-tennis market that had never existed in the United States. Sitting second in the West after three weeks is a decent start, but it also places Texas on a fragile balance. The gap to the leading Bay Area Blasters, still unbeaten, is neither so large as to be fateful nor so small as to be dismissed. In a league with three matches a week, the standings can flip after a single weekend. That is why week four matters more than its surface suggests. In the first match, Texas Smash lost 7-14 to Florida Crocs. McBeath still won his singles against Marc Duran 2-1, with games of 11-9, 7-11 and 11-6. But in the golden-game segment, he lost 3-5 to Angel Naranjo, and the Crocs took the golden game 21-16. This is the key point to understand about the format: the golden game is not a fifth match in a best-of-five sense. It is a cumulative points race between the players of the two teams, running to 21. Each player contributes a small segment, and those segments add up to the overall result. When McBeath lost his segment 3-5, he did not lose a standalone match — he put his team in a position where later segments had to recover the deficit, and this time they could not. In the second match, Texas beat New York Slice 14-7. McBeath beat Mohamed El Beialy 2-1 with games of 8-11, 11-8 and 11-7. In the golden game, he won his segment against Yiran Wu 6-2, and Texas took the golden game 21-19. The contrast between the two matches sits here: when McBeath won his golden-game segment, his team won the golden game. When he lost, his team lost. That correlation is too clear to ignore, though I must still note the sample holds only two data points. In the third match, Texas beat Atlanta Blazers 17-4, a result Table Tennis England called emphatic. This time McBeath played both doubles and singles. He and Senura Silva won the doubles 2-1 with games of 7-11, 11-6, 11-7. In singles, he edged Woojin Kim 2-1 with games of 11-10, 7-11 and 11-10 — both winning games at the absolute narrowest margin. But in the golden-game segment, he again lost to Woojin Kim, 3-5. Texas still won the golden game 21-20. That is, his team won, but his personal contribution in that segment was negative. Three singles matches, three wins, but two games settled at 11-10 and one at 11-9. Add a golden-game record of one win and two losses, and the picture becomes far more complicated than the unbeaten figure alone. Notably, McBeath carried both doubles and singles in the same fixture. In a thin roster, a player who shoulders both the doubles and the singles shows he is the competitive anchor of Texas Smash, not merely a squad member. That role has its cost: each extra game is accumulated fatigue, and when games repeatedly stretch to 10-10, that physical cost multiplies. The doubles pairing of McBeath and Senura Silva deserves a pause. This is a cross-national pairing — an English player partnered with a Sri Lankan one. In traditional national leagues, such pairings rarely exist, because players are usually developed within the same system. But in an internationalized professional league, pairing is based on technical complementarity and scheduling, not nationality. They won 2-1 after losing the first game 7-11 — once more, the pattern of dropping the opener and then coming back appeared. This shows both players' in-match adjustment, but also that they need time to read opponents. Here I want to pause on an aspect I consider central: the design of the golden game. If this format folds team outcomes into a short race to 21, it inadvertently turns players who thrive under narrow-margin pressure into strategic assets. McBeath, with three decider wins in three matches, is exactly that type of player. But the same format gives a 3-5 segment loss the weight of a match defeat. A player can win all three singles and still leave his team exposed in the golden game, and that happened twice in three matches. In other words, the format creates two parallel kinds of value. The first is the ability to win matches — McBeath has it. The second is the ability to contribute points in a short cumulative race — here his record is merely average, with one win and two losses. A team aiming to win MLTT needs both, and Texas Smash is currently certain only of the first. One more layer needs peeling back: the value of these wins for McBeath's own career. Because MLTT awards no ranking points, victories here will not lift him a single place in the world ranking, nor open a spot at major WTT events. Their value lies at another level: maintaining match feel, keeping the rhythm of international sparring, and building a dense match record that team managers can look at. For a player in the middle of his career, matches like these are a way of not being left behind during the gaps between major events. In the wider picture, the appearance of internationally mature players in a US league says something about the economics of this sport. A player outside the absolute elite still needs income and match intensity to sustain form. Leagues such as Japan's T.League and Germany's Bundesliga have long played that role. MLTT is trying to become another node in that network, using the US market as its base. The fact that an association news outlet for English table tennis reports on a US league, with English, Spanish, Egyptian, Korean and Sri Lankan players, is a small piece showing that the professional labour flow of table tennis is shifting in less-noticed directions. I still keep my habit of reading results my own way, starting from the places few look. I have learned more from a match in a lower division than from ten grand finals broadcast with fanfare, because there the decisions appear more nakedly, unshrouded by aura. MLTT, in the third week of its first season, is exactly such a place. There is a way of reading this story that I consider mistaken, and it is very easy to fall into. It is reading McBeath's unbeaten record as proof of superior form. Three wins, three trips through a decider — it sounds like a player at the peak of his nerve. But look at the structure: two games at 11-10, one at 11-9, and his repeated loss of middle games against opponents for whom I lack ranking data to compare. A genuinely superior player usually does not let matches reach 10-10 three times in three days. Winning by two-point margins says more about the evenness of the league's level than about one individual's class. This is precisely the blind spot of result-based reading. When the data material runs dry — no rankings, no historical head-to-heads, no technical indices — people tend to cling to the most visible number: the win count. But if I am wrong, if the alternative hypothesis holds, the scenario would be this: MLTT gathers a group of similarly levelled players, and most games fall into two-point margins. In that scenario, three unbeaten matches are not proof of superiority, but only the outcome of a favourable coin-flip run. A sample of three matches is too small to distinguish the two possibilities. When the material runs dry, only then does one clearly see what truly sustains tactics: ideas. And there is a signal I consider far more important, yet little noticed: Paul Drinkhall sits in the coaching seat. He is a veteran English international, still at an age where he could compete on the national stage. His taking a head-coach role in a US league, rather than within the English table-tennis system, is a signal about career trajectory. If he chose an unfamiliar environment to begin a coaching path, that may be a way of building a résumé outside his comfort zone. For a player past his competitive peak, this is a sensible step — but it also reminds me that a table-tennis player's career is far shorter than a person's working life, and most systems are poorly prepared for the gap that follows. In Texas Smash's model, one player shoulders the matches while a veteran commands from off-court. That model works when both roles are filled, but it is also fragile: if either pillar is absent, the structure wobbles. That is the systemic risk of a thin roster built on a few key individuals. Week four, beginning on 30 October, will be the first test of two questions. First, whether McBeath keeps winning by two-point margins, or whether the league's even level begins to pull him back toward the mean. Second, whether Texas Smash can find a way to turn his golden-game segments into a plus, rather than letting them be a minus as in two of the last three outings. I will rewatch every game, recount every point at 10-10, and let the data answer instead of my instinct. What carries a team over the long run is not one unbeaten week, but whether they can fix their own errors before those errors repeat.