Wimbledon, England – No one, including Lindsay Davenport, could have expected this epic to end with three double faults.
One more withering Davenport groundstroke perhaps. Or one last wild Kim Clijsters forehand, landing somewhere in the potted plants at the back of Centre Court.
Instead, with the Wimbledon quarterfinals on the line, Clijsters, who was the hottest player on the WTA Tour, took the balls and blew away three points, the last at 15-40, and with Davenport waiting, anxiously, put this otherwise fabulous 1 hour and 50 minutes of tennis in the books.
And so the still highly neglected No. 1 player in the world swept through the most important match of the tournament, 6-3, 6-7 (4-7), 6-3, on Monday to earn another tough confrontation this afternoon against U.S. Open winner Svetlana Kuznetsova.
It’s the eighth time in 11 Wimbledons that Davenport has reached the quarters.
“I was able to go through a really, really long stretch of not getting broken until I served for the match,” she said. “Against a returner like Kim, that’s all I can ask for.
“No matter what happened, I stuck to my game plan, even when I started missing balls.”
Davenport wanted to keep the points short; she wanted to play a bit risky, going for the lines, and she wanted to maneuver the ball to Clijsters’ forehand, which she hits with much too much backswing for grass. Attacking that long backswing, said Davenport, “was a big part of the plan going in.”
The Davenport-Clijsters match was a tossup before this weather-perfect Day 8 began, with Clijsters having perhaps a slight edge because of her success at Eastbourne the week before Wimbledon.
Everyone else, however, came through as expected. Second-seeded defending champion Maria Sharapova, who hasn’t lost a set, dunked No. 16 Nathalie Dechy 6-4, 6-2; No. 3 Amelie Mauresmo defeated No. 13 Elena Likhovtseva 6-4, 6-0; No. 5 Kuznetsova won over Maggie Maleeva 6-4, 6-3; resurgent No. 9 Anastasia Myskina, the 2004 French Open champion, defeated No. 6 Elena Dementieva, an upset only in comparative seedings; No. 8 Nadia Petrova won over Kveta Peschke 6-7 (5-7), 7-6 (11-9), 6-3; No. 12 Mary Pierce beat Flavia Pennetta 6-3, 6-1; and No. 14 Venus Williams defeated Jill Craybas, who had put her sister, Serena Williams, out on Saturday, by 6-0, 6-2.
For Clijsters, this match was a bitter disappointment. She had been playing beautiful tennis and seemed to have a good chance of finally winning a Grand Slam on her 21st attempt.
For Davenport, it was a win she richly deserved because of the constant pressure she put on Clijsters. You could argue quite effectively that no one, including Sharapova, strikes the ball on grass as well as Davenport. The only issue for her, as always, is her quickness.
Two statistics were key: First, 37 percent of her serves were unreturned; second, despite the unending criticism of her foot speed, she knocked off 17 points at the net.
Still, there is a lack of respect for her. Though she has been married for 26 months, Wimbledon officials identified her on the Centre Court scoreboard as “Miss L. Davenport.” An official in the referee’s office said it’s up to the player to request the name change. She laughed it off later, but made it clear she’d prefer “Ms. L. Davenport.” Not “Mrs. L. Davenport” and not “Mrs. L. Leach,” her husband’s surname.
These were the two best servers in women’s tennis and, though there was an early exchange of breaks, both served very well until Clijsters’ inexplicable failure in the final game.
It’s been a particularly strong Wimbledon for Venus Williams, who is into the quarters after going out in the second round last year.
“It’s probably a really big challenge mentally to play both Serena and I in a row, so I guess I had a good position to be the second sister,” she said of Craybas.
Williams now draws Pierce, whom she has beaten six of nine times they’ve played.
