TABLE TENNIS: Teresa Swain from Co Kildare plans to do her best and "go home with a load of medals". One of Ireland's 20-strong team competing in the table tennis section of the Games, she was yesterday in celebratory mood, writes Kitty Holland.

She and her female doubles partner, Ms Hanna Guinan from Dungarvan, Co Wexford, had just beaten Uzbekistan in their first match of the 'divisioning' process.

The process, which essentially seeds the competitors, will take place until this evening at the RDS main hall in Dublin, before the tournament 'proper' gets underway on Wednesday morning.

Mr John Byrne, Sports Commissioner of table tennis, explained there were 58 countries taking part in the sport, and 248 athletes. So they must be paired to compete with athletes of approximately their own ability.

"We do this with a system called the Swiss Ladder System, where athletes in groups of 16, 24 or 32 play the others in their group until they are ranked, one to either 16, 24 or 32. This decides the level of ability and then we have to decide on pairings by gender and age."

During divisioning, all matches are a standard five minutes each and the highest scorer wins. When the tournament starts on Wednesday, standard rules apply

A "minimum" of 150 matches were played yesterday with another 150 today, said Mr Byrne. Keeping score are 32 umpires - 27 Irish volunteers and five invited from abroad.

Irish table tennis coach, Mr Arthur Bret, was pleased with how his charges were doing yesterday.

"We have 10 men and 10 women and so far we're doing very well," he said between matches. Asked whether his team were worried about any of the others, he said they were not."We don't worry about that kind of thing."

He did, however, concede that China and Germany were fielding teams "at the top of their game".