Venus puts world number one in her place

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London: If ever there was a contest to make the rankings system in women's tennis look absurd it was Thursday's mismatch of a semi-final between the peerless Venus Williams and the clueless world number one Dinara Safina.

Williams continued her march towards a third successive Wimbledon singles title, and her sixth overall, by beating the Russian Safina 6-1 6-0 in comfortably less than an hour.

Victory, before a Centre Court crowd that was at best half-empty at the start and still far from full at the end, took Venus through to Saturday's final against her sister Serena, who needed every scrap of her renowned fighting spirit to beat another Russian, Elena Dementieva.

If that match had shown the oft-maligned women's game at its best, this contest was frankly no contest at all.

Venus barely had to break sweat to win through to her eighth Wimbledon final, and her fourth against Serena.

The 29-year-old American, who will meet Serena on US Independence Day, set the scene by holding the first game to love and then breaking her Russian opponent with something close to disdain.

While Safina can certainly hit the ball hard, she had nothing else to offer. There was no variation to her play, no attempt to mix up the angles or the depth of her shots: in short, there was no plan B.

All Safina could do was hit the ball harder, give herself even less margin for error on every groundstroke, and the inevitable result was a series of mistakes to hasten the end.

Safina eventually held her serve in game six but there was not even the merest hint of her making a comeback and Venus closed out for victory in 51 minutes.

FINE TUNING

The governing body of women's tennis recently changed the way it calculated its world rankings, bringing it more in line with the men's game, but the system may still need work.

Venus is ranked at number three in the world, and is seeded three at Wimbledon too, but few would doubt that she is the best there is, at least on grass.

After the match, it was put to Venus that she had "beaten the computer" by overcoming Safina, a world number one who has never won a grand slam title, with such ease.

She accepted that analysis, but said it was too soon to judge the rankings system.