AFTER THE match we filed into the interview room to the side of Centre Court.
“Good afternoon,” said the moderator. “Dinara Safina. Questions please.” And from there it went down hill. Again.
The awful thing about post -match interviews is that players have to do them under contract or they can be fined up to $10,000. In the old days Andre Agassi and Goran Ivansevic used to storm off in a fury and take the financial hit. But kids these days know how to watch the pennies.
The words and phrases Safina didn’t want to hear repeatedly came up as if it was a painfully recurring dream. It was probably like watching Venus Williams hit the ball past her several dozen times and, like any normal dream, she moved in slow motion or couldn’t hit the ball back or was somehow frozen in the moment as everything else moved at normal speed.
Bad dreams are like that and in the semi-final of a Grand Slam they can be magnified because of the fallacious expectations of parity of ability.
This has been a bad week for Safina. It would have been a critical week for women’s tennis if not for Elena Dementieva’s hard -nosed but unsuccessful assault on Serena Williams. But for the world number one, Safina, to be beaten 6-1, 6-0 in the semi-final of Wimbledon seems almost like a perverse attack by Williams on the WTA ranking system.
It has been repeatedly asked over the last week how rankings should be set. The Williams, cleverly, as it now appears dip in and out of the women’s tour in order to preserve their injury-prone bodies and follow other business interests. They only pursue the Majors and when the two, particularly Venus, came charging through the draw with her large wingspan and swinging racquet taking everything down, they wondered how one of the sisters was not ranked at the top of the ladder.
“Nightmare; Disappointed; Can’t cope; Haven’t won,” were the words that were thrown at the ragged 23-year-old from Moscow.
“I think she’s just too good on grass. It’s not my favourite surface and it’s her favourite surface so she honestly was too good today,” said a disconsolate Safina.
What else could she say? She declined to accept that the 51 minutes spent on court, her expression fixed in a state of disbelief, was a nightmare.
There was no real tactical nous that Williams employed, or, indeed needed. It was like a hitting session with some junior she picked up at the Roehampton qualification tournament. The first 6-1 set was 27 minutes and the second 6-0 took just 24 minutes, or, less than four minutes a game given that they rested at the exchanges.
Her statistics for the match are remarkable and prompted more than one person to ask IBM if their machine ran out of numbers other than zero. Safina hit zero aces, zero volley winners, zero smash winners, zero approaches, zero passing winners, zero drop shots, zero lobs and six successful drives.
Venus was asked if the result was embarrassing for women’s tennis. “Why do you put it like that?” she asked defensively. “Are you trying to be down on women’s tennis?” Down on Safina being ranked number one she was told.
“So you’re trying to be down basically. Okay because I don’t deal with down at all. I’m just trying to make sure you’re not trying to be down because I respect Dinara Safina immensely and I think you should too.”
And everyone did. Respect wasn’t the issue, the system was. But there it stayed. The most one -sided semi-final since the 1960s when Billy Jean King sent some hopeful scuttling back to the locker room 6-0, 6-0 was over.
Father Richard will fly home saying his family work is done. The sisters will play in the final, Venus seeking her fifth title, Serena her third, the tennis world order undisturbed.
