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Sharapova and Williams Advance to Final Sharapova and Williams Advance to Final
(35 minutes later)
PARIS — As Maria Sharapova celebrated her return to the French Open final, she let loose one last scream — this one a happy holler. PARIS — It was only a coincidence that both French Open women’s semifinal matches ended with aces, because there was almost nothing else similar about the performances that got Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams to their moments of triumph and into Saturday’s final.
Sharapova, the defending champion, overcame 11 double faults and won a shriekfest against Victoria Azarenka in the semifinals Thursday, 6-1, 2-6, 6-4. In a three-set victory over Victoria Azarenka, Sharapova seemed to throw the ball up without being sure how it would come down. In one of the most dominating performances this late in a major tournament, Williams placed the ball wherever she wanted in a 46-minute demolition of Sara Errani.
Sharapova’s opponent Saturday will be No. 1 Serena Williams, who defeated Sara Errani, 6-0, 6-1, in just 46 minutes Thursday to reach her second French Open final. Williams, who won here in 2002. The results only reinforced the theme of the last two weeks: the rest of the women’s field, including the defending champion Sharapova, may merely be a foil for Williams’s relentless march toward her second French Open championship.
Sharapova beat Errani in the final last year to complete a career Grand Slam. Williams overpowered Errani, last year’s runner-up so completely – 6-0, 6-1 but somehow felt even worse -- that Williams rarely seemed to be breathing hard. She stood menacingly several steps inside the baseline on Errani’s slow serves to tee off with her thunderous returns, then unleashed 125 mile-per-hour serves that left Errani frozen in place.
“This is such a special tournament for me, obviously being the defending champion,” Sharapova told the crowd. “It was really my goal to get to the final stage.” Williams won the first set in just 21 minutes, breaking Errani at love in the final game. The match was a virtually flawless session that looked much more like a practice for Williams than a Grand Slam semifinal, complete with the occasional drop shot and backhand volley.
She advanced past Azarenka with a clamor. The two most notorious grunters in tennis wailed on nearly every swing, matching pitch and volume as they swapped powerful shots from the baseline. They sounded as if they were pushing a stalled Peugeot across lanes of traffic in the Arc de Triomphe. Williams hit 40 winners to 2 for Errani, had only 12 unforced errors and won 52 points to Errani’s 16. Errani won just five points on Williams’s serve.
“Come on, Monica,” a spectator yelled at Sharapova, referring to one of the game’s great grunters, Monica Seles. Only two Roland Garros semifinals in history can compare in lopsidedness: a 6-0, 6-0 victory by Chris Evert over Camille Benjamin in 1984 and Evert over Francoise Durr, 6-1, 6-0 in 1973. A note of caution for Williams, though: Evert lost both finals after those victories.
The aggressive swings resulted in a seesaw semifinal. Sharapova whacked 12 aces but was erratic with her second serve, and her ground strokes were also unpredictable. It is hard to imagine the same fate for Williams. When Errani finally won a game – the fourth one of the second set – she raised her arms in triumph. Williams did not even look that excited when the match was over.
She needed five match points to seal the victory. Serving for the victory for the second time, she held at love and finished with an ace. Errani summed up the formula for beating Williams right now: have your best day and hope Williams is having a very bad one.
“Those last few points are the toughest,” Sharapova said. “I’m so happy that I regrouped and came out at 5-4 and served it out really well.” Asked if she could take anything from the match, Errani answered succinctly.
Following a 35-minute rain delay before the third set, Sharapova hit four double faults in a single game, the last of them on break point, to make it 2-2. She struggled again with her serve at 5-2, losing a tense, sloppy 12-minute game when she squandered four match points and double-faulted on the final two points. “Nothing,” she said. “She played unbelievable.”
She was steadier at the end, however, and after accepting a cursory congratulatory handshake from Azarenka, Sharapova screamed through a grin. It was Williams’s 30th straight match victory, and it places her near the finish line of a mission she has been on since crashing out of Roland Garros in the first round last year. She is in the final for the first time since she won the tournament in 2002 and is playing at such a high level that she will be an overwhelming favorite against Sharapova. Williams owns a 13-2 career edge over Sharapova.
She improved her record at Roland Garros to 43-9, best among active women. That includes victories in her past 13 French Open matches. Williams’s victory over Errani was such a fait accompli that Sharapova was forced to answer questions about her own failings against Williams even before Williams had completed her match.
Azarenka, a two-time Australian Open champion, was playing in her first Roland Garros semifinal. She still believes she can win a clay-court Grand Slam title. “You know, of course I have lost to her numerous amounts of times,” Sharapova said. “When I go out there, I obviously ‑‑ whatever I have done, like I said in the past, has not worked. You try to go out there and do something different, because whatever you have done just hasn’t performed well. I hope that I can.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Not this year.” It did not sound like resounding self-confidence, not surprising considering Williams has been pressed just once here, by Svetlana Kuznetsova, who took the only set from Williams in Paris so far. If Sharapova watched any of Williams’s match against Errani, she must have realized that her serve will have to be much more consistent in the final than it was against Azarenka, despite the 6-1, 2-6, 6-4 score.
In the men’s semifinals Friday, seven-time champion Rafael Nadal plays No. 1 Novak Djokovic for the 35th time, and Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga faces the Spaniard David Ferrer. It was fitting that Sharapova won on an ace on the centerline, because the match was a study in the vagaries of her serve. She had 12 aces and 11 double faults, including two in a row that allowed Azarenka to break her serve when Sharapova was trying to close out the match at 5-3. If she does that against Williams, she will probably look up to find her creeping toward the service line to pressure her even more.
Sharapova, who lost her opening set in the quarterfinals, 6-0, started slowly again against Azarenka. Sharapova double-faulted twice in the first game and was broken at love. Sharapova trounced a mistake-prone Azarenka in the first set, winning by 6-1 in just 28 minutes. But as Azarenka steadied herself in her first French Open semifinal, Sharapova began to waver. Azarenka broke her serve twice in that set, and Sharapova was so unsettled that she seemed to be stalling as raindrops began to fall, hoping the match would be stopped. The rain lasted only a few minutes, but play was stopped for more than a half-hour. That breather allowed Sharapova to regain her composure, if not her serve.
But this time she quickly righted herself, temporarily finding the range with her serve and cracking ferocious returns. She won 22 of the final 26 points in the first set and closed it out with an ace. Even after breaking Azarenka’s serve twice in the third set, Sharapova was shaky. She blew four match points on her racket in the eighth game of the set, and allowed Azarenka to hold at love in the ninth before finally ending it in the 10th.
“The serve is definitely something that you never know what to expect,” Azarenka said. Sharapova has lost her last 12 matches against Williams. She has not beaten Williams since 2004, the year Sharapova beat Williams at Wimbledon for her breakthrough.
Then Sharapova began to misfire while Azarenka found her timing. Consistently stepping into the court and smacking ground strokes close to the baseline, Azarenka swept the final four games of the second set to even the match. When she was asked if she thought she had played well at any point recently against Williams, Sharapova summoned a single set – in Miami this year. Sharapova won that set before losing the next two, including a 6-0 third set. More recently, Williams dismantled Sharapova on clay in Madrid, 6-1, 6-4.
Next came rain, and when the match resumed both players struggled to find any rhythm. The tennis was louder than the crowd in the third set when subdued fans quietly endured a flurry of errors — forced and unforced — by the two big hitters. “Well, I’d be lying if it doesn’t bother me, obviously,” Sharapova said of Williams’s advantage in their meetings. “I don’t think that it would be a pretty competitive statement if I said I didn’t. I would love to change that around. You know, I'm proud of the way that I came through this tournament. I have given myself a chance to face, you know, the favorite.”
Only a chance.