Bartoli slips in without fanfare

Tennis:Under the cover of bigger names, higher seedings and louder screams, Marion Bartoli quietly slipped into her first Grand Slam semi-final. The French girl went almost unnoticed as one Williams sister and the second seed, Maria Sharapova, departed the competition and the other Williams sister staked a reasonable claim to the trophy.

It was Serena, who came into the championship with the lower ranking, but Venus remains in the draw.

The strangeness of yesterday's oddly dry day was that Serena's loss against tournament favourite Justin Henin and Sharapova's defeat at the hands of Venus would have sat more comfortably in the semi-finals or final. The four biggest names in the draw have won 19 Grand Slam titles between them; while the other half of the fourth round - Bartoli, Michaella Krajicek, Ana Ivanovic and Nicole Vaidisova - have won none.

As Serena left, she will know too that if she continues to pick and choose tournaments, and falls below the annual quota of 17 the top players are expected to play, her ranking points will continue to suffer and her seeding in majors will lead to days like yesterday, days of meeting the best players just after mid-point of the competition.

But it's doubtful if they will ever change and Venus is proof the Williamses' idiosyncrasies do not prevent them from moving through a Grand Slam.

The elder sister, seeded 23, has moved from a state of not being able to keep a ball in court in her first-round match, against Russia's Alla Kudryavtseva, to cleaning Sharapova's clock 6-1, 6-3.

The match, played almost exclusively from the back of the court, was never in danger of becoming competitive. In the sixth game an 82 mph serve from the 20-year-old was returned at 90 mph as Williams stepped into a ferocious return.

That first set took 32 minutes, Williams threatening to take the Sharapova serve seven times, winning two of the points in question and swiftly moving into the second set.

In form like that, Williams is close to unbeatable, and though Sharapova has struggled for some time with a shoulder injury, which allowed her serve to be savagely attacked, the American controlled the match because she raised her game.

Keeping the tempo high and building points with rallies that at times exceeded 20 strokes, Williams earned 12 break points and converted two of them for 6-3 and the match.

"In my whole life I've been a big-match player," she said afterwards. "This is obviously a fourth round. It wasn't the ideal draw for her. For me I didn't know if I was even going to be seeded. Wherever I landed, I landed. I was going to play."

Even without the heavily bandaged left calf, a memento of her dramatic match against Daniela Hantuchova, Serena Williams was up against the French Open champion, whose game has travelled well from the Paris final.

And Williams went into the match with not one injury but two. She had slipped in the previous match in the third set and sprained a thumb. That removed her normal backhand from the equation.

"I was definitely not 100 per cent at all," she said afterwards. "I was possibly 40 per cent or 50 per cent max. My leg's doing better but last match I fell, sprained my thumb and can't really hit backhands.

"Any contact . . . when the ball hit my racquet, it vibrated to my hand and it hurt really bad. I didn't know if I was going out, to be honest, because it was hurting so much in practice.

"It was a last-minute decision. If I was healthy, I think I would have won, 100 per cent."

It was little surprise then that a short time later she and Venus pulled out of the doubles.

They had been scheduled to play the Spanish eighth seeds, Anabel Medina Garrigues and Virginia Ruano Pascual, in the second round.

And so to young Bartoli. Not even the most chauvinistic of her French compatriots would have seen this lady, from Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne, getting this far this week.

Seeded 18, she had already knocked Jelena Jankovic out of the competition. Yesterday she dispatched the Dutchwoman Krajicek - whose brother Richard was the 1996 Wimbledon champion - in three sets, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2, becoming the first to reach the semi-finals.

She meets Henin next, a different prospect. This time, though, all eyes will be on Bartoli.

"I slept for an hour during the rain delay," she said. "I think after that I was feeling much better. So it was good for me to have the rain delay."

Well then, no nerves either for the debutant.