SOUTH Essex Gym Club duo Max Whitlock and Brinn Bevan both recovered from hard falls to help the British team into a strong position to qualify for the team final of the World Championships.

Whitlock and Bevan both crashed to the mat on the high bars, the first of the apparatus in qualifying, at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow on Sunday.

But they picked themselves up to help the team, which also includes Daniel Purvis, Louis Smith, Nile Wilson and Kristian Thomas, to top their qualifying pool with 354.417 points.

They now face an anxious wait to see if that points score is good enough to make the top eight of all the teams aiming for qualification, with the pools going on in Glasgow until Monday night.

Bevan, 18, from Thundersley, showed great courage to pick himself up after his fall from the high bars and said afterwards he was on a learning curve at his first major championships.

“It was a really good experence,” said Bevan, a former pupil at Deanes School. “It was my first senior World Championships and I made a couple of mistakes but it’s all a learning curve and the team came out with a really great result in the end, so I’m happy for everybody.”

Talking about his fall, where he remained on the ground for several seconds, Bevan said: “You have to get over it. Each piece of apparatus is a different competition in itself. You have to forget about it and move on and do a good job on the next one.”

Whitlock also recovered well, shining in his floor routine and just finishing behind Smith in the pommel horse rankings, but he still faced a fight to make it into Friday’s all-around final, an event he won a silver medal in at last year’s World Championships.

With two men only from each country going through to Friday’s individual all-around final, Whitlock was locked in a battle with youngster Nile Wilson with Purvis out in front as the top British scorer.

After the final parallel bars routine, both Whitlock and Wilson were tied on 88.365 points.

Under the rules when there is a tie, the lowest score of the six apparatus is dropped, thereby enabling Whitlock to go through by the slenderest margin of 0.133.

The British men must finish in the top eight to claim a spot in Wednesday’s team final and gain that all-important qualification spot for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.