Angel wings it and makes Serena wait
Angelique Kerber 6 6 Serena Williams 3 3
SERENA WILLIAMS had to wait more than two hours for her chance to join Margaret Court as the Greatest Of All Time – and the result means her wait will go on even longer.
Winning at Wimbledon yesterday would have brought her 24th Grand Slam title, matching the feats of the Australian legend.
But after hanging around while Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal fought their epic semi-final, Serena just couldn’t get started when she did finally get on court.
And it took 30-year-old Angelique Kerber just 65 minutes to cash in on her erratic play with a 6-3 6-3 victory and become the first German women’s Wimbledon winner since Steffi Graf in 1996.
Williams (below) refused to make an excuse of the delay and insisted that her march to the final here as a 36-year-old working mum was only the beginning of a new stage in what has been an incredible career.
“I’m not going to ever make an excuse,” she said. “The wait definitely didn’t have any impact on me. It was a necessary evil – they didn’t finish their match and it had to be done.
“Actually this whole tournament I didn’t have a definite start time, so I was fine. These two weeks have told me I can compete for the long run in a Grand Slam.”
But for all her refusal to complain, you couldn’t help but feel that with all the top 10 seeds knocked out there won’t be a better chance to take that 24th title, certainly not with her ranking likely to be too low to be seeded for the US Open.
But Serena’s tennis was a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.
Kerber collapsed with joy at the end. Her own story has been a fight back after reaching the world No.1 spot in 2016 and then losing her way.
The new champion said: “I have been though every experience good and bad – and that definitely helped keep me calm to win.”