Serena Williams: Wimbledon's queen remains a stubborn force
By Tom Fordyce
Chief sports writer at Wimbledon
| Wimbledon on the BBC |
|---|
| Venue: All England Club Dates: 27 June-10 July |
| Live: Coverage across BBC TV, BBC Radio and BBC Sport website with more on Red Button, Connected TVs and app. Click for more details |
Some players are studies in perpetual motion, others are all nervous ticks and quirky habits, or pent-up aggression, or canny conductors of the crowd.
Serena Williams on Centre is a queen surveying her court.
Two months short of her 35th birthday, a year since her last Grand Slam title, you might expect a little age or fallibility to be showing through. Both might be there, working on her mind as well as her body, but this is not a monarch preparing for her abdication.
Tuesday afternoon, and a quarter-final against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. A 21-time Grand Slam singles winner against a woman who has never been higher than 13 in the world. Because this is Wimbledon, the support is all for the underdog.
If it irritates Williams that her titles, her longevity, her talent and her shock-and-awe groundstrokes are not enough to make her the crowd's favourite, she does not show it.
Roger Federer glides around Centre with leonine grace. Rafa Nadal ricocheted around it like a rubber ball. Williams is so measured in her movements, so regal in her deportment, that she dictates the pace of everything happening around her.
It is half-haughty, half-asleep. As she walks from her chair to receive serve in the opening game, it takes her 23 paces to get from net-post to baseline. For a woman associated with unmatched physical power, each Serena step is surprisingly delicate. People have walked from bedroom to bathroom first thing in the morning at greater pace.
Williams has admitted to feeling sometimes like three contradictory characters in one: the warrior player, the clothes-designing girlie girl, the insecure body-conscious woman.
She has names for them. Summer is all smiles and thank-you notes. Psycho Serena is the on-court competitor. Then there is Taquanda, the angry, out of control one, the one who told a line-judge at the 2009 US Open line judge that she would stick a ball somewhere it is not ordinarily stored.
Against a pumped-up Pavlyuchenkova she rules with an almost icy detachment.
Waiting to receive she is almost motionless, swaying only slightly from side to side. Ready to serve she is equally restrained. No bouncing the ball 20, 25 times as Novak Djokovic does, no compulsive wiping of face on towel like Nadal. Two bounces, a cold glare across the net, the sudden simple violence of the serve.
The message is clear: Nothing can disturb me. No-one will hurry me. I am in control.
At one point early in the first set a ball-boy scampers to retrieve a stray ball that is rolling into her path. Serena flicks her hand dismissively. Boy and ball scarper.
In her second-round struggle against Christina McHale she was often flustered and frequently angry. In Monday's demolition of Svetlana Kuznetsova, Taquanda almost stepped onto the stage: when she slipped on a damp court and tournament referee Andrew Jarrett initially refused to close the Centre Court roof, Williams fixed him with an admonishing look and muttered, "If I get hurt, I'm suing".tomado de :http://www.bbc.com/sport/tennis/36718950
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario