Few dreams have survived the fury of a Williams game. Serena with her gladiator dress and Maria Sharapova in a wispy Cinderella outfit cut mildly comical extremes. The less diplomatic had termed it Bambi versus Zena the Warrior Queen. A Disney set with a Hollywood ending all courtesy of a driven father, Yuri, and a teenager with the hunger of a scavenger.

Much has been made of the Wimbledon women's final, not least the way Sharapova opened her match against Williams: miserly and supremely single-minded to Williams's error-prone. The American's forehand was failing miserably and her misfiring serve was taken and savaged by the normally slow-starting Sharapova.

Williams, who had not played a grass-court tournament since winning here last year and had eight months off due to injury, was obviously under-cooked coming into the tournament. Still, few believed her bulletproof confidence and heavy-armour game would be shaken so easily by a youngster playing in her first Grand Slam final.

It took the young Russian just 30 minutes to send the number one back to her chair wondering what it was going to take to halt her 6-1 assault. This was a steamrolling. No one had ever done it to Williams before. No one had ever taken her game and blown it apart as violently as Sharapova did in that first set.

"I am very surprised. The first set. It was very tough but I felt throughout that the whole set like I was in control. I don't know how I got to that point in the first place," said Sharapova.

In a candid admission, she also claimed to have gone into the match with no tactics and no idea of what she was going to do other than impose her robust game on the principal driving force in power tennis.

"To tell you the truth. I did not have a big tactic going into this match. I was just there to play my game and figure out a way to win and figure out what I needed to do just to get used to her game a bit. Did that pretty fast," she said.

The second set, while more evenly matched, was driven along by the younger player. While Williams earned three break points on the Sharapova serve, she only broke her once, in the sixth game. Many thought that would spark off a Williams revival but straight away Sharapova followed the text-book instruction on what to do when your serve is broken and immediately broke back, held serve and, with a chilling sense of purpose, broke again to lead 5-4.

Serving for the match was a nerveless, almost processional sequence, Sharapova hitting her second ace of the day and putting in an unreturnable serve for the cushion. When Williams's forehand mishit found the net at match point the Siberian fell to her knees in disbelief before embarking on the obligatory hike up through the crowd to her father, the one person in Centre Court who looked even more excited than his daughter.

Williams will look at her match statistics and 6-1, 6-4 scoreline and sweat but if ever there was an occasion where the bald facts of the match were consumed by the emotion, this was it. Sharapova's win and Anastasia Myskina's Roland Garros triumph also make Russia, not America, the dominant country in women's tennis. Six Russians are now in the world's top 13, Boris Yeltsin's meddling in the sport some years ago paying off where years of expertise and huge financial investment have failed in other countries.

"It's amazing. I'm absolutely speechless," said the teenager. "I never, never in my life expected this to happen so fast. It was never in my mind that I would do it this year."

Still her blissful moment wasn't about to blinker her ambitions. "I'd like to win all of them. I'd like to win all the Grand Slams," she declared.

Williams, although gracious in defeat, set out her stall quite clearly. "Oh, I'm at like 20 per cent right now," she said before pointing to the problem areas. "My serve, my forehand. I don't know a lot of stuff." She added. "For me it's (losing) something I don't enjoy. I can't sit here and lie about it. I don't enjoy losing so I do things so I don't have to."

It will be remembered as the year Bambi gored the Warrior Queen and created history. The first Russian Wimbledon champion and youngest since Martina Hingis in 1997.