Australian Open 2016 Schedule: Thursday Replay TV Coverage, Live Stream Guide
At this point in women’s tennis, Serena Williams winning a Grand Slam title is less of a possibility and more of an inevitability.
Sure, there are times where she is bound to slip up and fail to capture a title, but the world’s No. 1 and all-time great is reaching a mid-2000s Tiger Woods level of dominance over her competition. If you have a choice between Williams and the field, you take Williams.
But when Polish youngster Agnieszka Radwanska advanced through to the semifinal to set up a match with Williams, there were some who harbored a thought deep in their minds that the No. 4 seed was going to be up to the task of upsetting the reigning champ.
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By the time the first game was over, though, all of those thoughts were wiped away and replaced by a single idea: Williams was going to dominate the match and barely break a sweat doing so.
Replay Info for Thursday’s Draw (Day 11, Semifinals)
Watch: ESPN (U.S. Only)
Replay Coverage (All ET): Tennis Channel, 6 a.m. - 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. - 10 p.m.; ESPN2, 2 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Williams and Kerber to Meet in Final
Radwanska didn’t have a good history against Williams already, and after breaking the opening game, the match already felt like it had been decided, as David Law of the BBC noted:
Completely dominating Radwanska, who struggled to get any pace on her first or second serve, which played perfectly into the hands of Williams, the next few games went exactly like the first: The favorite looked nearly unbeatable.
Whether it was the presence of Williams or the stage she was on, Radwanska seemed unwilling to take any risks in the match to try to surprise her opponent, leaving her in a vulnerable position, according to Matt Cronin of TennisReporters.net:
After just 21 minutes, Williams had claimed the opening set 6-0 and looked to have one foot into the final.
Howard Bryant of ESPN The Magazine shared some knowledge he once received from a tennis great, but he added that during this match, it did not apply at all to Williams:
Surprisingly, showing a bit of poise in the face of such huge odds, Radwanska claimed the opening game of the second set—holding serve for the first time in the match—and from there, the match started to turn.
Williams won the next three games, looking like she might run away with the second set as well, but Radwanska answered with three straight games of her own to take a 4-3 lead in the set and insert some doubt into the mind of her opponent.
But like the 34-year-old has done so many times before when facing the pressure in tough situations, Williams reached down and found another gear that other players just don’t have, and she claimed the next three games to win the match 6-0, 6-4 and earn a spot in her seventh Australian Open final, per the tournament’s official Twitter account:
On the other side of the bracket, British upstart and unseeded surprise Johanna Konta was facing off against No. 7 seed Angelique Kerber, with the winner earning a spot in her first-ever Australian Open final.
Konta made headlines at the start of the tournament by upsetting the elder Williams sister, Venus, with relative ease and managed to carry that momentum through to the semifinal, but she was up against her toughest foe yet. Still, despite the great odds, the underdog represented herself well.
Falling behind 3-0 in the opening set, Konta battled back by winning the next four games and pushed Kerber to the brink in the opening set before faltering at the end to lose the set 7-5.
The second set was much easier for the 28-year-old German, though, who easily dispatched her overmatched opponent to claim the match 7-5, 6-2 and earn a trip to the final against Williams.
As Ben Rothenberg of the New York Times noted following the match, Williams will be attempting to tie the record for modern Grand Slams set by Steffi Graf, a German, against another German, Kerber:
Williams would match Graf's record of 22 with a win on Saturday.
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