Coco anger at ‘unfair’ Maria
NO sooner had Maria Sharapova blown kisses to all corners of Centre Court than her vanquished opponent accused her of unsporting behaviour.
Coco Vandeweghe, the unseeded American who lost a briefly see- sawing match, was angry that the Russian distracted her by moving as she served at her.
‘That’s why I spoke to the umpire,’ said the world No 47 afterwards. ‘She said she didn’t believe Maria was doing it during the motion of my serve. I strongly disagreed.
‘Towards the later end of the second set I said that if she had a problem speaking to Maria — if she was too scared to do it — I had no problem speaking to her.
‘I felt that Maria moving was not sportsmanlike. I try to play as fair as I can. This was not being reciprocated.’
What Sharapova was accused of is a grey area.
A lot of players move, sometimes in the manner of a cricket batsman’s trigger movement at the crease, without deliberately seeking to cause any distraction. Andy Murray steps in. Tim Henman used to shift about even more markedly.
The one thing we can be sure about with Sharapova is that she would do anything necessary to prevail.
The Ice Maiden is as hard as nails.
The Russian was asked if she believed she had done anything different from normal. ‘No I didn’t,’ she said. ‘It is what it is. I am not going to argue against her words.’
The upshot of Sharapova’s victory is her first semi-final at Wimbledon for four years against the opponent, Serena Williams, she beat in the final as a 17-year-old champion here as distantly as 2004.
‘It’s always a new match,’ she said, dismissing the relevance of 11 years ago. ‘I haven’t had a great success against Serena. I would love to change that around. That’s how I look at it.’ There was a moment on Centre Court, with clouds blowing overhead, when her passage into the last four looked shaky. After a smooth enough first set, Sharapova was in charge in the second only for nerves to intervene with the match seemingly at her mercy.
She got to within two points of winning it but the big-serving Vandeweghe — the granddaughter of Miss America 1952 — took the set into a tie-break, which she won 7-3.
‘Good luck with that,’ said Sharapova, the fourth seed, when asked for an insight into why she had been debilitated by nerves.
‘I don’t even know what was going through my head at that moment.’
Sharapova returned to type in the third set, her foot firmly applied to Vandeweghe’s windpipe.
In Sharapova’s case there was nothing wrong with a neighbouring bit of anatomy: the voice box.
Her banshee scream was in full flow. The most perplexing aspect is why she has to emit a high- decibel shriek when playing a delicate slice.
Give me a third runway at Heathrow any day.