Winning the first point with an imperious ace down the middle, Venus Williams struggled to hold her own for an hour before crumbling to a rampaging Garbine Muguruza, who ran away with her first Wimbledon singles title 7-5, 6-0.
Williams, who had lost only one set in her tranquil progress to the final, found she was up against a very different opponent — one who could counter-punch however hard the ball was thrown at her.
Initial gameplan
Sensing early in the game that raw power may not be enough, Williams’ initial gameplan seemed founded on an approach of being defensive, or at least conservative, on the Muguruza serve and draw her into making mistakes during the rally.
This almost worked when the score was 3-2 when Williams had a break point which she failed to take advantage of, making a poor forehand. She went on to have two set points on the Muguruza serve at 5-4, but the Spaniard defended to level and then closed out the game with some brilliant tennis, including a commanding smash.
By now, Muguruza was growing in confidence and she immediately broke Williams, who had begun to make more and more errors off the groundstrokes. Down 5-6, Williams exploded in a burst of aggression in an attempt to wrest the set back, but Muguruza had the better of the baseline exchanges, reaching set-point with an exceptional flick for a backhand lob that flirted with Williams and her extended racquet before scurrying away from it.
With the first set already lost, Williams, who looked as if she was tiring and wanted to keep the points short, turned very aggressive. This resulted in some intense exchanges between the two players and while Williams was triumphant on some points, the high-risk strategy resulted in errors streaming off her racquet much faster and thicker than winners.
The first game of the second set was lost when Williams served a double fault after her first serve ‘ace’ was successfully challenged on Hawk-Eye by Muguruza. The Spaniard consolidated the break, making light of Williams’ attempts to rush the net with passing shots.
Breaking Williams a second time to go 3-0 up, Muguruza pumped her fist, a gesture that seemed to signal that with this game she had the match pretty much wrapped up.
And she did. With Williams looking somewhat disoriented and listless in the end, Muguruza went up 40-0 and went on to win the game, set and championship with a line-call challenge that Hawk-Eye confirmed, to a tense audience, was out.
In the second set, Williams won only 40 per cent of the points on her first serve and failed to win a single point off her second. In addition, she made as many as 10 unforced errors in a set that was over in a flash.
The Spaniard, who Tracy Austin described as “rising like a bullet” in 2015, will now go up the WTA rankings to 5.
She has come a long way since that year, when she lost the Wimbledon final to Serena Williams after a string of significant victories.
While her serve and her return-of-serve remain her principal weapons, the impetuous, almost wild, passion of 2015 has tempered into a honed and much more threatening aggression.
Muguruza is the second Spanish woman to win Wimbledon. Her coach Conchita Martinez was the first in 1994.
Published - July 15, 2017 08:24 pm IST
