Louis Laville came to Bolton as the champion in two of the three Open events. He left with two silvers, both lost to teams with James Ling in them, both in three games. The margins were tiny. The meaning is not.
The short answer: James Ling was the only player to win two Open titles at the 2026 English Nationals. He took the men’s doubles with James Chaudry on Saturday and the mixed with Eleanor Tomkinson on Sunday, beating Louis Laville’s top-seeded teams both times, 10-12, 11-9, 11-5 and 11-3, 7-11, 12-10. The top seeds won one of the three Open finals. Our view: the English Open game is no longer a title to defend, it is a contest, and the national championship should start seeding like it.
The decider on Sunday went to 12-10. That is the whole story in one scoreline, and also not the story at all.
Eleanor Tomkinson and James Ling had taken the first game of the mixed Open final 11-3, the sort of game that makes the other side wonder whether they have turned up at the right venue. Molly O’Donoghue and Louis Laville, the defending champions and the top seeds, answered with an 11-7 second game. Then came the third, which was close enough to need extra points and ended with Ling holding a second Open title in two days. A year earlier, O’Donoghue and Laville had won this same event. Twenty-four hours earlier, Laville had lost the men’s Open final to Ling as well.
It is tempting to write that up as a coup. It wasn’t quite that. It was something more interesting, and more useful for anyone who cares about where the English game goes next.
Saturday: the men’s Open
Ben Cawston and Louis Laville were the No. 1 seeds by Picklebook’s draw numbers. They won the first game of the final 12-10, which is usually the moment a top seed settles. Instead James Chaudry and James Ling, the No. 2 seeds, took the next two, 11-9 and 11-5. The third game was the only one of the match that wasn’t close.
Chaudry and Ling had reached the final by beating Harry Feast and Jack Edwards 11-5, 12-10 in the semi-finals. Feast and Edwards then took bronze, beating James Lofthouse and Josh Bright 11-3, 12-10. Bright, worth remembering, won this title with Laville a year ago, according to Pickleball England’s 2025 results. This time both halves of the 2025 champion pair finished without gold, on different sides of the draw.
Sunday: the mixed Open
Tomkinson and Ling were only the third seeds. They behaved like the first. They won their group 4-0, conceding 15 points across four matches, which is about as close to a clean sheet as round-robin doubles allows. In the semi-finals they beat the second seeds, Katie Morris and James Lofthouse, 11-4, 13-11. Then came the final: 11-3, 7-11, 12-10.
In the bronze match, Morris and Lofthouse beat Evie Kenna and Alexander Minogue-Stone 6-11, 12-10, 11-7, so even the consolation prize went to a decider.
Our numbers: two games of six, 50 points to 62
Put Laville’s two finals side by side and they look like this. His teams won two games out of six. They scored 50 points and conceded 62: 26-32 on Saturday and 24-30 on Sunday. Each final was lost by six points over three games, and in each case Laville’s team had at least one game they could point to and say, “we were there”.
That is not a collapse. A collapse is 11-2, 11-3, and nobody would be writing a feature about it. This is something subtler: a player who was the best in the country last year and who is still, by any reasonable measure, among the best two or three, finding that the gap between him and the next tier has closed to roughly the width of a net cord.
The world rankings say the same thing in a different language. On the PPA Tour’s athlete pages, Laville is No. 246 in the men’s World Pickleball Rankings and Ling is No. 263. Seventeen places apart, out of a ranking that runs into the thousands. If you had asked the rankings to call the finals, they would have shrugged.
Who is James Ling?
The interesting part is how Ling got here, and how fast.
His PPA Tour profile says he has been “playing pickleball for just over a year”. In that first year of competition, it says, he earned 15 professional medals across the European circuit. They include singles gold, men’s doubles silver and mixed bronze at the Egypt Open; singles silver and mixed bronze at the Rome Open; and singles silver, men’s doubles bronze and mixed bronze at RTA 500 England. He has finished in the top ten in singles on the RTA European Tour. The profile lists him as 29, 6ft 4in and right-handed, and says he turned pro in 2025.
That is the profile of a player built by the new European pro circuit rather than by the English club ladder. He has been learning the game against people who play it for money, in Cairo and Rome, and then bringing that home to a national championship that is still, for most of its 1,468 entrants, a very large and very friendly club tournament.
Laville’s profile, by contrast, places him in Epsom, aged 31, with his highlight reels drawn from the Daytona Beach Open in Florida. Both men, then, are already playing beyond England. The difference this weekend is that the newer one won.
O’Donoghue keeps one crown, and the women’s side holds its shape
The women’s Open was the only final the top seeds won, and it went the distance too. Morris and O’Donoghue beat Evie Kenna and Eleanor Tomkinson 11-2, 5-11, 11-3. Lauren Gosling and Rachel McCrae took bronze.
O’Donoghue won two Open titles in 2025: the women’s with Thaddea Lock and the mixed with Laville. She kept the first with a new partner and lost the second to the same opponent who had beaten Laville the day before. Tomkinson reached two finals and won one, which, given that her one win came at O’Donoghue’s expense, makes her weekend arguably the best of any woman in Bolton.
The women’s game is a little more settled at the top than the men’s. It is not settled.
The Senior Opens: the same lesson at 50-plus
The Senior Opens told a similar story about how quickly the old order can move. Anna Linton and Richard Love won the 50+ mixed again, beating Claire Bourgoin and Ian Marshall 11-8, 11-3. We wrote last week about what their third title in a row says about English senior pickleball.
On Friday, though, the run ended elsewhere. In the men’s 50+ Senior Open, the top seeds Rupert Robinson and Bernie Audibert beat Nathan Hill and Ian Marshall 11-4, 11-5, a year after Robinson lost the 2025 final to Love and David Youngs. In the women’s, the third seeds Barbara Capper and Sharon Tinsley beat the top seeds, Amanda Evans and Julie Mac, 11-7, 11-4. Marshall, like Laville, reached two finals and took silver in both. It wasn’t a weekend for it.
The Wheelchair Open Doubles went to Lottie Chatfield and Jen Russell, ahead of Scotty Turner and Lucas Town.
The context: a bigger event, a thinner gap
This was the sixth year of the Nationals at Bolton Arena, according to Pickleball England, and the biggest. A record 1,468 players registered, according to Active Bolton. Players also raised fair questions over the weekend about the ball, the courts and late format changes, and our view on what 2027 should build on is here.
Growth like that changes the top of the draw as well as the bottom. When a sport adds a fifth of its national championship field in a year, most of the new players arrive at 3.0 or 3.5. But some arrive as Ling did: athletic, quick learners, with the time and the appetite to go and play on the European circuit within months of picking up a paddle. A few of those are enough to turn a final from a coronation into a coin toss.
The global picture points the same way. Two months ago the English Open at the NEC drew a record field from 56 countries, according to the APP, which runs it. English players now share a calendar, and increasingly a ranking list, with players from across Europe. The Nationals are where they come back and find out where they stand against each other. This year the answer was: very close together.
The argument: seed it like a contest
Here is the firm call. The English Open game is now a contest between four or five men and a similar number of women, and the national championship should treat it that way.
At the moment the seeding is the draw number Picklebook gives each pair, and how Pickleball England arrives at those numbers is not set out on the event pages. That doesn’t make the seeds wrong. Cawston and Laville at No. 1 was a perfectly defensible call. But a seeding is a forecast, and a forecast the size of a national title should show its working. If world ranking points, DUPR ratings or last year’s results drive it, say so on the event page. Players entering with a fresh international record, as Ling did, deserve to know how that record counts.
The second call is simpler. Ling is now the player English pickleball should be watching. Not because he is clearly better than Laville (the rankings, and two finals decided by six points each, say he isn’t, yet) but because he is the clearest evidence so far that the European pro circuit is producing English players faster than the domestic game can rank them.
And the third: Laville is not finished, and anyone who writes that he is will look silly by the summer. He lost two finals in three games to the man of the weekend. Most players would take that as a bad weekend. Champions take it as a schedule.
What comes next
The 2027 Nationals will start with the men’s Open looking like a genuine three-way race between Ling, Laville and whoever Chaudry and Cawston choose to partner. The women’s Open will start with O’Donoghue as the player to beat and Tomkinson as the one who already has. That is the healthiest state a national championship can be in.
A seeding is a forecast. Sunday was the weather.
Results and scores: Picklebook, 2026 English Nationals, read 2 November 2026.
Disclosure: Chris Beaumont, editor of World Pickleball Magazine, was a commentator at the 2025 English Nationals.
Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine, published by World Pickleball Media Ltd. He follows the global game closely, reporting on news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball…
View All Articles →
