Sisters have every right to keep it in the family

SIDELINE CUT:ON THE timeless, dusty centre court lawn of Wimbledon, the Williams sisters double act will return with a vengeance today. For the third time in a decade, the tennis siblings reared on the burning asphalt of inner-city Los Angeles will have England's most regal and evocative sporting stage to act out what some suspect to be a private sorority rather than a genuine rivalry.

Once again, Venus and Serena Williams have proven that once they apply their minds and athleticism, they can lay waste the field of solemn and anonymous European players that form the majority of the cast on the women's circuit. And you don't have to queue for strawberries in SW 19 to get the distinct impression much of the tennis world would rather the brilliant and exuberant sisterhood cleared off and found something else to do.

The comments of Elena Dementieva, who hinted that today's final would be decided by Richard Williams rather than by his daughters, will hardly rank as the most gracious exit remarks in the history of the tournament. The Russian promptly released a statement blaming her poor command of English, but her remarks seemed a masterclass of insinuation rather than a bumbled attempt to comment on the sheer strangeness of two siblings finding themselves at the pinnacle of a world sport.

And in any case, Dementieva was surely simply suggesting what the rest of the tennis establishment thinks and discusses over the tinkling of gin-and-tonic cocktails.

Accusations of complicity have been following the Williams family since the girls began to realise their father's monumentally crazy dream, gatecrashing the rarefied world of elite tennis and soon afterwards cheerfully obliterating all before them.

It was not the romantic vision of his girls curtseying before some minor figure of British royalty that inspired Richard Williams to study tennis tapes and manuals and devise a half-daft, half-genius intuition for the game. Rather, it was the slim chance of escaping the bitter and reductive schema of life that has ruined countless young talented people in the pocket of Los Angeles where he reared his family. The fact Williams chose tennis, the white, suburban game, rather than the more obvious and accessible sport of basketball suggests a vision that sparkles with desperation as well as true genius.

Perhaps he recognised his kids were unusually athletic and tennis was one of the few sports that gave women the opportunity to amass great wealth and a high public profile. But for all that, those early, improvised lessons he gave his daughters, during the very years when Niggas With Attitude were rapping about gang culture in the city and the behaviour of the LAPD police precipitated riots, were surely conducted in blind faith.

Nowadays, Ice Cube has become soft, enfranchised and rich, and the Williams sisters seem more renegade and revolutionary than the rap stars of yesteryear.

For sure, the Williamses have amassed great wealth through their Grand Slam wins and commercial potential. But when all is said and done, there is the sense that they - happily - remain slightly outside the overwhelmingly white tennis culture and privately delight in rehashing those countless Los Angeles practice matches amid the floral beauty and history of Wimbledon's centre court. Straight Outta Compton - and into your living room.

The quality of the women's game has drawn controversial comment down the years, from the blatantly dismissive attitude of Bobby Riggs, who, at 55, goaded Billie Jean King into playing and soundly whipping him in a "battle of the sexes game" in 1973, to the charmless "fat pigs" comment made by the Dutch star Richard Krajicek during the debate over equal prize money in the early 1990s.

But for all the chauvinism and derision, every decade has had its brilliant stars, from Margaret Court to Martina Navratilova to Steffi Graf. Pit those great figures against public darlings like Chris Evert or Gabriela Sabbatini and there was enough drama and intrigue to keep the public enthralled.

The difference today is that when the Williams sisters play against each other, the tennis world must look on from the outside at what is the most exclusive club in the world. The Williamses are a formidably close family, and although they are polite and respectful the sisters have managed to reign supreme in a way that must seem effortless to their less talented peers. It must be galling to many of those who regularly lose to the Williamses to consider that Serena was, as recently as last year, ranked 140th in the world. Boredom, injury and an audacious belief in her potential as an actor/designer hastened that plummet down the charts. But in the space of 12 months, simply by putting her mind to it, she is on the verge of landing another title.

So Venus or Serena? Another lame duck of a match - Serena won both their previous Wimbledon final showdowns, in 2002 and 2003 - will guarantee a louder repeat of the grumbling about Richard pulling the strings.

It would be better for the public if the pair hated one another and were not even on speaking terms, using the tennis courts as a medium to vent their sibling rivalry.

The opposite is the case, and the one certainty about this afternoon's family affair is that the Williamses' unshakable sense of solidarity will remain intact.

It is still hard to fathom that the son of Louisianan sharecroppers set about raising his daughters to take over the world of tennis - and then did it. And their story acquired a stinging poignancy when Yetunde Williams, elder sister of the tennis stars, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Compton in 2003, another case in the old neighbourhood of wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time.

It was a searing reminder of the very violence that drove Richard Williams to consult those tennis videos with a mad professor's gleam in his eye.

There is no reason the Williams girls cannot duel it out fiercely this afternoon. Athletes in every walk of life like to reminisce about the ferocity of the childhood games they played in their back gardens. Perhaps the Williamses cannot summon that burning intensity, that sporting hatred, when it comes to serving a tennis ball to the other. After all, they made it through the hard part. As they have repeatedly demonstrated, beating nice girls for tennis trophies is a piece of cake. Having to beat each other is the toughest trick of all.

The thing is, they earned the right to take this stage and the rest of the tennis world can just put up, shut up or - if they are good enough - beat the sisters at their own game.