By Chris Bailey

With a team that was hastily thrown together at the last minute, Sutton defied the odds to pick up badminton silver at the 2013 Balfour Beatty London Youth Games.

The side of eight found themselves starring at the finals weekend of Europe’s largest annual youth sports event at Crystal Palace over the weekend.

The team – featuring Kim Lim, Meera Sivakumaran, Henry Wu, Leon Griffiths, Gemma Atkins, Zhi Ping Lim, Chloe Du and Chris Davis – eventually lost to favourites Redbridge in the final.

And proud Sutton team manager Craig Buchanan admitted his surprise that they even managed to qualify from the group stages after being pieced together in a short space of time.

“I’m absolutely delighted,” he said. “We didn’t expect to get anywhere, so to get through to the final was an outstanding performance and I’m very proud of them.

“With the exception of Chris Davis the team are very young, they were playing a lot of 17-year-olds and they did fantastically well.

“This is a new team. I don’t think Sutton has had a badminton team for nine or ten years, so we didn’t know what to expect.

“I know there are a lot of strong teams, but the team played really well together and they were shouting for each other.”

The efforts of the eight in the badminton helped Sutton to a 14th-place finish in the overall Jubilee Trophy standings with 958 points as Wandsworth won with 1189.

Sutton also enjoyed success in the girls’ squash, where they took first place, while finishing third in both the boys’ basketball and girls’ table tennis.

They had already managed first in the girls’ judo, second in the boys’ disability swimming and a third place in boccia before the finals weekend. And after picking up his badminton racquet at short notice, Davis admits there were no regrets with how the team performed.

“We played really well and we can say we played against a team that we lost to in the group stages – we lost to them 5-0, then we lost 4-1 in the final,” said the 17-year-old.

“I’m really pleased with how it went. It’s a good event, you get to meet a lot of different people and you can definitely relate to different people so it was great.”

The London Youth Games is delivering a sporting legacy from the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics by inspiring more young Londoners to play and volunteer in sport. London’s councils including Sutton along with Balfour Beatty and Sport England support Europe’s largest annual youth sports event which has over 100k athletes competing across 85 competitions over nine months.