The Tenth Day: the daily preview
Today's semi-finals of the Ladies' Singles will provide a new face for Saturday's final and possibly a new champion. But don't tell Serena Williams that. As the only previous winner at The Championships among the remaining quartet, and a four-time winner at that, the 30-year-old from Florida will be boosted, rather than burdened, by history today as she seeks to extend the Williams family's 21st century domination of the Ladies' event.
Only three times in the 12 years since the Millennium has Serena or her older sister Venus failed to capture the Venus Rosewater Dish, and the body language of Serena and her coach and father Richard indicates a confidence that the celebratory bunting may be fluttering in Palm Beach Gardens again this weekend as Serena has done what the great champions do, overcome the hurdles and settled into her best game as the crucial stage of the tournament draws closer.
She certainly wobbled in the third round, needing two and a half hours to see off Zheng Jie 9-7 in the third set, and then squeezing past Yaroslava Shvedova 7-5 in the Round of 16. In fact, Serena has spent longer on court (eight hours seven minutes) and lost more games (47) than any of the other semi-finalists. None of which will bother her in the slightest.
Nor will the fact that she is up against the in-form player of the 2012 season, Victoria Azarenka, who won the Australian Open in January, embarked on a run of 26 straight singles wins and reigned as world No.1 for 19 weeks, a ranking she will regain if she can defeat the younger Williams sister this afternoon. "If Victoria wins she's had a better year than I have," said Serena. "She's been so successful already, winning a Grand Slam, but going against a player like that I feel she almost has an advantage. So that makes me really relaxed and I can just kind of hit."
After she put out the defending champion, Petra Kvitova, the bookmaking fraternity have made Serena the favourite for the Ladies' title, to which she says, "I don't think about that. I just think I [need to] do the best I can. Hopefully, I still have two more matches to play and win. That's my goal."
Unlike Serena, the 22-year-old Azarenka has enjoyed unblemished progress into her second successive Wimbledon semi-final, 10 sets won and none conceded in the six hours she has spent in action. But the head-to-head statistics of the two women do not make comforting reading for the Belarusian. Only one of their eight matches has gone the way of Azarenka and she has lost to Serena five times in Grand Slams, three times at the Australian Open, once at the US Open and in the quarter-finals of the 2009 Championships.
Those results are shrugged off. "I don't really like to look back in history because every time you step on court it's a new story," she said. "You kind of write your own history every time. Serena is a great champion. It's going to be a tough match, but that's what you expect to have in semi-finals. We've had good matches, we've had bad matches. We'll see."
It is the other semi-final, between Germany's Angelique Kerber and Poland's Agnieszka Radwanska, which will usher a newcomer into a Wimbledon Ladies' Final. The third-seeded Radwanska is, at 23, a year younger than Kerber, who is marching in the wake of famous footsteps by aiming to become the first from her native land to reach a Wimbledon singles final since Steffi Graf in 1999.
Kerber, who makes her home in the northern German port of Kiel, lost in Wimbledon's first round last year and stood at 100 in the rankings, so her progress to eighth seed has to stand as phenomenal progress. She was a semi-finalist at the US Open last September, defeating Radwanska in the second round, and was a quarter-finalist at the French Open last month. She has won titles in 2012 at the Paris indoors and in Copenhagen, narrowly lost the Eastbourne final and is overflowing with confidence and good humour.
Radwanska has also made such huge strides this year, rising from eighth to third in the world, that she even has an outside chance to stepping up to No.1, but only if Azarenka is beaten today and then she defeats Serena in Saturday's final. If that happened she would be the first from her country to top the rankings tree. It's quite an incentive.
