When interrogated whether Serena Williams contemplates adding more variety to her power-based game, she did not take kindly to the question's premise. Williams replied that she plays hard tennis. Maybe if one wants to get out there, she can show it like, how she mixes things up. She hit a lob today. She is hitting slices and drop shots, especially more recently. She added that power is often extremely good to have in ones game. But if she was to sit here and hit every ball hard, her arm would fall off.
It cannot be ignored that Williams does pound serves up to 121 mph (195 kph) in the first round of Wimbledon on Tuesday. In fact, her ground strokes are big, too enough for a 25-5 edge in winners versus Mandy Minella of Luxembourg.
Truly, Williams has been displaying a soft touch when required during a winning streak that reached 32 matches. Amazingly, it is the longest single-season run on the women's tour in 13 years with a 6-1, 6-3 victory over Minella.
This marked the top-seeded and top-ranked Williams' return to tournament following a short break after winning the French Open on 8th June for her 16th Grand Slam trophy.
Her first match on a grass court was winning her fifth Wimbledon title as well as two Olympic gold medals back-to-back at the All England Club a year ago. In fact, that was the starting point of a sequence in which Williams has scored 75-3 while claimed three of the past four major championships.
The 92nd-ranked Minella confirmed that one can call her pretty much unbeatable. She is playing better than ever. Every time she enters the court, one can see why.
In fact, off the court, things have been a little more chaotic for the 31-year-old American lately. Tuesday's victory commenced a week brimmed with a headline-capturing, off-court squabble with Maria Sharapova and subsequently a series of apologies emanating from a magazine profile.
Williams and the French coach Patrick Mouratoglou who has been helping her for about a year, concurred that she did not have too difficult time keeping aside the events of the previous seven days, which included a lot of apologies during face-to-face with Sharapova at a news conference in two separate statements posted on the web regarding things that Williams quoted as saying in a Rolling Stone story. Specifically, Williams made a negative reference in a phone conversation to a top-five player's love life which was about Sharapova as well as an off-the-cuff remark about a widely known rape case in the U.S. that was identified by some as criticizing the victim.
Williams insisted that it hasn't been a distraction. She is just here to focus on the tennis. When quizzed that whether she and Sharapova had spoken in the past 48 hours, Williams disclosed that they are playing on opposite days, so they doesn't really see each other.
To be precise, the third-seeded Sharapova and Williams are residing on different halves of the draw and probably could lock horns in the final. The 2004 Wimbledon champion Sharapova was scheduled to play her second-round match on Wednesday on Court 2 versus 131st-ranked qualifier Michelle Larcher de Brito of Portugal.
To be frank, it has been difficult for any rival to keep things close against Williams recently, even if she claimed on Tuesday that she never feels invincible. In spite of her recent success and a strong show against Minella, she and Mouratoglou analyzed that there are areas of her game that could use some fine-tuning. Williams admitted that after today, there are so many ways through which she can improve. She is going to improve if she wants to stay in the second week of this tournament.
Mouratoglou's opinion after watching Williams win her first 17 service points and compile a 25-5 edge in total winners is that, he means of course, not everything is perfect yet. It is interesting to watch what they need to work on for the future.
