Tennis/Wimbledon Championships: It had everything other than a sense of conflict. It was a battle without disagreement, a confrontation without dispute, writes Johnny Watterson.

The Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, have changed the game of tennis and people will have to befriend the transformation.

They will have to learn to love the deliberate impersonality of it, the way the Williams's, when they play each other, remove the character and menace from their Grand Slam crusades and replace them with just the rackets and balls.

Long silences punctuated this centre court final, a strange, passionless affair between two sisters and friends. While people marvelled at their unmatched athleticism and ability to play a distinctively forceful brand of tennis, it was an arid couple of hours, a match in which both players had deliberately excised the dimension of personality.

It was not a choreographed match, although the cynics could point to one or two balls padded back to Venus that could have been put away with more venom. But it was unquestionably uneven, an unsatisfying, forgettable meeting.

The question is whether their furious style of tennis can compensate for the lack of bite so evident when they meet as adversaries.

After the match Serena was asked whether she had played her points differently in order to exploit her sister's known injury. She shrugged her shoulders and said: "No . . ." It should have been a scarcely believable admission given it was the most important final in world tennis, but the Williams have applied their own rules to just about everything.

It also transpired that such was the extent of Venus's abdominal strain she probably would have defaulted had it not been Serena she was facing in the final. Her concerns were drawn from a tournament in Indian Wells two years ago when she defaulted five minutes before a final and was booed when she appeared in the stadium to watch a match.

A final that showcased the two biggest games in the world not so much unfolded but unravelled for Venus, with injury preventing any credible attempt to upset her younger sister and world number one Serena.

Venus also had a strapped hamstring, injured from over-compensating for her abdomen. She was, in short, a wreck, and although it went to three sets, once the trainer had been called after the first game of the third set, when Venus surrendered her serve, any sense of an upset foundered.

While the precision and power of the tennis sometimes rose way above that which any other players can produce, the match also went through long periods of yawning ordinariness. Venus hit 25 unforced errors and only 19 winners, while her sister hit 30 errors to 31 winners. While deciding what is a mistake and what is a winner is an inexact science, it was a credible if unsavoury fact that more errors than winners were hit over the two hours.

Emotionally, Venus was a mess, playing the game throughout as though she were out to break a Wimbledon final speed record. Capitalising on a weak start from Serena, who won just two points in the opening three games, she took the first set 6-4.

By the second set, the percussion of the drives became louder and more frequent, with Serena finding her range and accuracy. While the crowd naturally fell into sympathy with the wounded player, her sister was less charitable and raced to a 5-1 lead before closing the set 6-4.

Unable to launch into her serves, Venus hit with both feet on the ground and was unable to play anything high, which precluded any overheads. Subsequently her entire game was confined to back court rallies - and even those caused her pain.

"It was kind of confusing out there," she said. "I wanted to keep it quick, but it extended to two hours. I wasn't gonna kill myself. I'm already in a hole. I'm not going to dig the hole a lot deeper."

The third set reinforced Serena's position as the dominant player as Venus went into a slow, distressing collapse. On match point, they embraced, neither smiling. Finally Serena smiled, remembering then she had just won her second Wimbledon title and sixth Grand Slam.

Once more it highlighted the Williams' pre-eminence, but the championships also uncovered a number of players other than Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne, who may match them in the coming years. All are Russian teenagers.

Vera Zvonareva, who beat Venus and made the French Open quarter-finals, Svetlana Kuznetsova, who reached the quarter-finals here, and perhaps the most talented of the bunch, 16-year-old Maria Sharapova, have posted intent. But will they squeeze the sisters? Default on that one.