Williams stamps and shrieks her authority

TENNIS/French Open:Paris in the spring presented its ugly sibling yesterday as rain lashed the suburbs around the 16th arrondissement, where only seven matches were completed.

For crowds that have traditionally been world class for the collective sigh and the sustained pout, Roland Garros - or Roland Gross, as the second Grand Slam of the year has been temporarily renamed - offered a day of frustration, of loitering, of staring balefully out of windows.

In the gloom, players as well as fans pouted for France.

The rain that threatened mid-morning was enough to make Serena Williams visibly anxious and reveal her game as undercooked. It also prompted the usually faltering Marat Safin to briskly see off an opponent without the characteristic bouts of gruff tardiness.

The reigning women's champion conformed to type, however, Justine Henin-Hardenne posting a rather serene 6-4, 6-3 win over Russia's unseeded Elena Vesnina in an evening match.

Safin whizzed through 6-1, 6-3, 6-1 in less than 90 minutes, enough to draw suggestions the contrary Russian must have had a spread bet on how long it would take him to rub out the 30-year-old Spaniard Fernando Vicente. It was also in stark contrast to the earlier stamping and shrieking at the skies that marked Williams's win as ball after ball missed the intended target.

"In the third set I thought, this is a clay court game I know how to play," she said after starting her 30th Grand Slam with a win. She has never exited first round.

Williams, who last won here in 2002 when she beat her sister Venus 7-5, 6-3 in the final, was pleased with the day's outcome as she tries to restore the family hegemony. Between 2000 and 2003, the sisters played in 15 Grand Slam finals (occasionally against each other) and won nine of them. Since 2003, Serena has been in just three finals and won two.

Then the younger Williams was in the process of winning her "Serena Slam" and in 2002-2003 she claimed all four Grand Slams at once. Since then her "unstable" health and occasional apathy have caused an alarming slide.

She started this year ranked 95th in the world and unfit but somehow annexed the Australian Open in January. In the intervening months, she has moved up the ladder, and she arrived in Paris seeded eighth for the competition.

Much fitter now, she makes an extremely dangerous opponent but in yesterday's dank weather her natural strength was negated as the ball slowed terribly, while the need to play her way into tournaments was again in evidence.

At 19-years-old, Williams's Bulgarian opponent, Tsvetana Pironkova, played much as mildly startled teenagers do when faced with a player with such an aura of authority and kept the ball in play. It probably wasn't her intended tactic but simply keeping the ball alive was enough early on as Williams continued to hit monstrous losers. Backhand, forehand, net, tramlines - no area was too far outside the play area for the former champion.

As she alternately pleaded with the umpire to call a halt to the match and grimaced up to the umbrella-festooned Suzanne Lenglen galleries as the rain splashed her head, she saved four set points before struggling to the changing rooms in time for lunch trailing 6-5.

On resumption just over six hours later, Williams immediately handed over the set to love for 7-5, but she quickly set about restoring order and raced to 6-1 to claim the second set, having ominously dropped serve in the first game.

Finally, she began to find her range on the ground strokes, the errors became fewer and Pironkova started chasing shadows. Concerned the next rain belt might arrive, the American tightened her grip and sped through the third set, again winning it 6-1, in what was both an impressive and unbalanced performance.

As for Safin, he jigged into the press conference quite unlike the ursine figure we have become used to. It was suggested to the 22nd seed his career had been up and down.

"It wasn't even ups and downs, it was just downhill," he replied with a shrug.