No slow start for Venus Williams this time.
After struggling in tight first sets in her opening two matches, the defending champion started quickly yesterday and then raised her game when she needed in the second to beat Spanish qualifier Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez 6-1, 7-5 to reach the fourth round at Wimbledon.
The four-time champion was barely tested in the first set by the 101st-ranked left-hander, but was pushed to the limit in the second when the Spaniard switched to an effective serve-and-volley game that forced Williams to come up with some of her best power tennis.
“I was very pleased with the performance,” the seventh-seeded Williams said. “Things got close in the second set. She was really playing well and I had to come up with something more than she was giving.”
The 25-year-old Martinez Sanchez had never won a Grand Slam singles match until this tournament and looked out of her depth in the first set against the six-time major winner. But she changed her game in the second set and scored repeatedly with serve-and-volley winners and angled drop shots and drop volleys.
“It was a great strategy,” Williams said. “In the first set it wasn’t working for her from the baseline. I was impressed with the way she changed strategy and made it really competitive in the second.”
The Spaniard rallied from 3-1 down to go ahead 5-4 on serve. But she double-faulted on break point to give Williams a 6-5 lead and the American served out the match to love, finishing with a 204kph delivery for her 11th ace.
Williams finished with 33 winners, as well as 10 unforced errors and six double faults.
Williams had played erratically in her first two matches against modest British opponents on Center Court, winning the first set in a tiebreaker against Naomi Cavaday and 7-5 against Anne Keothavong.
Also advancing to the round of 16 yesterday was fifth-seeded Elena Dementieva, who beat Gisela Dulko of Argentina, 7-6 (2) 7-5 and Thailand’s Tamarine Tanasugarn, who staged a superb fightback to reach the fourth round for the seventh time in her career with a 4-6, 6-4, 6-4 win over New Zealand’s Marina Erakovic. The 31-year-old now has the chance to make it to the quarter-final of a major for the first time if she can beat either second seed Jelena Jankovic or Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki.
■ BOYS' SINGLES
STAFF WRITER
Taiwan’s Yang Tsung-hua, the second seed in the boy’s singles competition, eased through the first round yesterday with a 6-4, 6-3 win over Jose Hernandez of the Dominican Republic.
Yang, the winner of the boys’ singles at the French Open last month and runner-up at the Australian Open earlier in the year, took 63 minutes to complete the win over Hernandez. Yang served 10 aces to his opponents one, won 85 percent of the points on his first serve and took three of the five break-points he created during the match, as Hernandez committed 18 unforced errors to the Taiwanese player’s 11.
In the second round Yang will face Italy’s Alessandro Giannessi.
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