TABLE tennis players with their roots thousands of miles apart came together to be crowned 80th-anniversary winners of a Merseyside competition.
Halton's Mark Roscaleer, 18, successfully partnered 26-year-old Polish ace Michael Rogala to open-doubles victory in the Liverpool Closed Championships.
Rogala, from Zlotow, is now living in this area and working for MFI/ Schreiber in Runcorn.
He and Roscaleer, who plays for Harold House in Liverpool, enjoyed a comfortable passage to the final, where they condemned the Liverpool CC pairing of Peter Lee and Keith Bird to a second successive runners-up spot.
Rogala, a Division Two player in the city for Greenbank, was the second seed in the men's singles and made it a memorable double.
He overcame the third-seeded German, Christian Petzsche.
Roscaleer reached the quarter-finals of the same event.
He is still classed as a junior with an England ranking of around 50.
He plays for Halton TT Club in the Junior British League and is with Sutton Cricket Club in Division One of the Halton League.
Roscaleer is celebrating further success after skippering Halton's first team to Division One glory in the Lancashire and Cheshire Junior League which saw its final weekend of action at Halton Stadium.
Neil Baker and Matthew McCormick were the other members in the team, which dropped just one singles game out of 42.
Halton's second team, captained by Ian Johnson and also featuring Michael Siu and Michael Howard, netted a mixed bag of results - defeating Oldham 6-0, drawing with Warrington but losing to Halton 1st 0-6.
