Wimbledon, England, Jun 26 : Serena Williams has been known to say she isn't satisfied with this or that aspect of her game, even after easily winning a match, say, 6-3, 6-2.
So it was somehow refreshing to hear Williams actually praise herself after a victory by that very score over 26th-seeded Maria Kirilenko at Wimbledon on Saturday.
Yes, only five matches since returning to the tour after nearly a full year off because of a series of health scares, Williams produced a performance worthy of the 13-time Grand Slam champion that she is. And then Williams talked the talk of someone finally ready to concede that British bookmakers might very well have been right to make her the pre-tournament favorite.
Asked whether she was surprised by the odds, the seventh-seeded American smiled widely and said: “I wouldn't bet against me.”
After hitting 10 aces and compiling a 32-9 edge in winners against Kirilenko, Williams termed the showing her “best I've played since I came back.”
“I was a little more consistent, and I played my game more,” said Williams, trying to become the first woman since Steffi Graf in 1991-93 to win three consecutive Wimbledon titles. “Wasn't as tight and nervous and uptight. I was able to relax more today.”
A few days after winning her fourth Wimbledon title last year, she cut both her feet on glass at a restaurant. That led to two operations on her right foot; she later was hospitalized for clots in her lungs, and then to remove a pool of blood that gathered under the skin on her stomach.
Understandably, she explained Saturday, she'd been playing tentatively until Saturday.
“You're always thinking, ‘I can get hurt again.' You just kind of have to let those thoughts go or anything could happen,” Williams said. “And I wasn't thinking that at all today. It was just a big difference.”
On Monday, she'll face 2007 runner-up Marion Bartoli. Other fourth-round women's matches include Williams' older sister Venus vs. No. 32 Tsvetana Pironkova, who upset the five-time Wimbledon champion a year ago; Wozniacki vs. No. 24 Dominika Cibulkova; and Sharapova vs. No. 20 Peng Shuai.
After beating Kirilenko—her first straight-set victory in five matches since returning—Williams revealed another, if less serious, mishap from her annus horribilis: She scraped her right shoulder and face when she fell off her pink bicycle during a ride near her home in Florida in October.
“I'm thinking, ‘Oh, nooooooo,”' Williams recounted, as though replaying her words in slow motion. “All I thought was, ‘Don't fall on my face. Don't fall on my face.' When I fell on my face, I was like, ‘No!”'
Since then, she's been sticking to stationary bikes. AP
