STONEHOUSE's Billy Shilton came away with a bronze medal at the ITTF Slovenia Para Open on Saturday. 

World champions Paul Karabardak and Billy Shilton had to dig deep to come through their first match against Piotr Manturz and Michal Deigsler from Poland 12-10 in the deciding set.

They lost 3-1 to Paulo Salmin Filho and Israel Pereira Stroh, the Para PanAmerican silver medallists from Brazil but secured their place in the quarterfinals with a 3-0 win against Matthew Britz from New Zealand and Samuel Altshuler from USA.

Karabardak and Shilton then produced a great performance to beat the Para PanAmerican champions Matias Pino Lorca and Ignacio Torres Orostica 3-0 to go through to the semi-finals where they were disappointed to lose 3-0 to the Swedish pair of Jonas Hansson and Sam Gustaffson.

Shilton said: “I don’t feel I played my best level.

“I made a lot of mistakes in tight moments in the game and I’m disappointed with that, but I think on the whole it has been another good tournament for me and Paul.

"Another medal - so I’m pleased with that and always pleased to play with Paul.

"There are a lot of things we need to practice and work on which I think is good.

"If we were coming into tournaments and not really learning anything that wouldn’t be great so we have got a lot of things to work on and I think once we get a bit of time to do that in Sheffield we will be in a much better position for Paris.”

Paul said: “There’s things we can improve on going into the Paralympics.

“I started to play well as we got through the group in the doubles especially against Chile and I thought we played some really good stuff in the doubles, and it is always nice to play with Billy.

"This is a difficult competition and I think it is better to have things to work on rather than it being perfect and then maybe you take your foot off the gas going into the Games. 

"We know we’re not at our best and we know that we’ve got stuff to work on which we’ll do going into Paris.

"Overall, it was a good doubles competition and I think we did well, and it is nice to get another medal.”