Venus beats Ostapenko to reach Wimbledon semis

Five-time champion Venus Williams won in her 100th singles match at Wimbledon to knock out French Open winner Jelena Ostapenko and reach the semi-finals.

Williams earned a 6-3, 7-5 victory against the 20-year-old Latvian in one hour and 13 minutes on Centre Court.

She will play either Britain’s Johanna Konta or Simona Halep in the last four.

Meanwhile, Garbine Muguruza reached her second Wimbledon semi-final with a powerful 6-3, 6-4 victory over seventh seed Svetlana Kuznetsova.

American Williams, 37, is the oldest player to reach the last four since Martina Navratilova in 1994.

She has not won a Grand Slam title since winning Wimbledon in 2008.

Williams dominated Wimbledon for almost a decade between 2000 and 2009, winning five titles and finishing runner-up in another three finals.

But the seven-time Grand Slam champion had become a peripheral figure after being diagnosed with Sjogren’s syndrome, an illness that causes fatigue and joint pain, in 2011.

She says she refused to consider retirement, despite her world ranking plummeting to 103 by the end of 2011.

The American returned to the top 10 last year and then reached her first Grand Slam final since 2009 when she lost to sister Serena at the Australian Open final in January.

Now she is just one more victory away from another major final after beating an opponent who was only born a couple of weeks before she made her SW19 debut in 1997.

Ostapenko confirmed her status as one of the rising stars of the women’s game when she earned a surprise victory at Roland Garros last month.

But her aggressive, risk and reward game came unstuck against the powerful Williams serve.

A single break point taken in Ostapenko’s first service game was enough to swing the opening set in Williams’ favour, before the hardhitting Latvian finally began to match her opponent’s power in the second.

Ostapenko wiped out a break for 3-3, only to see Williams ramp up the pressure to break for 6-5, holding out to love for her 86th singles victory at Wimbledon.