Venus Williams strode into the semi-finals with a another awesome display of power tennis which doesn’t augur well for any opponents attempting to derail her charge for a fourth Wimbledon crown.
Her quarter-final match with Svetlana Kuznetsova was explosive from the opening shots. But it was Williams who emerged as the 6-3, 6-4 victor after 85 minutes of lengthy and and sometimes brutally powerful exchanges.
Kuznetsova, sporting the new braided hairstyle on which Williams has been giving her advice, produced an excellent opening game which immediately gave Williams a wake-up call as she was forced to fend off a series of break points.
Immediately the match had the makings of a high-quality encounter and so it proved with the Russian bludgeoning winners all over the court. However her early superiority proved short-lived.
In the fourth game, a break point down, she selected the wrong option, a softish lofted backhand into the forehand corner which Williams simply swatted away past her to make the first break.
From that point, Kuznetsova struggled to adapt her game to meet the aggressive approach adopted by Williams who powered to the first set in 29 minutes.
Kuznetsova was also struggling with hay fever problems which affected her eyes. The few drops she took to ease the sight problem proved inadequate as, at the start of the second set, her serve came under immediate siege. She had to save seven break points and finally drew on Hawk-Eye to overrule a call which would have made her face a sixth deuce on her only game point.
But Williams’ resolve was clear and in the fifth game she captured the weakening Russian’s serve, but then was surprised in the next as Kuznetsova struck back to level, assisted somewhat by blustery conditions suddenly arriving on court.
Nonplussed, Williams recovered the break to love in the seventh and held on to serve out three games later, but not in the comfortable manner that the scoreline suggests as 22-year-old Kuznetsova, playing her fifth Wimbledon, was not ready to concede.
The fifth seed saved five match points and squandered an opportunity to get back on serve, before capitulating when she let fly a forehand error.
Kuznetsova gave her all but, in the final analysis, she lacked the variety and firepower to combat the greater experience and power of Williams. The American, who was the lowest seeded lady - at 14 - to ever win Wimbledon in 2005, remains on course to improve that record with her current seeding of 23.
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