Players always see what they want to see, Venus Williams will look at Angelique Kerber's last match and see how she lost her serve six times. Kerber will look at her last match and see how well she played to win her quarter-final against Simona Halep despite dropping her serve six times.
“I think actually it was a good match, on a really high level from both of us. Yeah, there were a lot of breaks,” said Kerber. “I think because we are both great return players, it was not so easy to serve. But it was a really high level match.”
Head-to-head record
The German fourth seed can also look at the head-to-head record and see that she has won three of their previous five meetings. It was Kerber who also beat Williams at the London 2012 Olympic Games at
Wimbledon
. For today’s semi-final all those things will go in the grinder.
Kerber is also one of those unusual athletes who writes and kicks with her right hand but plays tennis with her left hand. Tennis is the only thing she does with her left hand.
Rafael Nadal is another player who plays left handed and does everything else with his right hand. The Spaniard changed because his coach and uncle Toni asked him to in order to give him an edge.
It’s a useful tool in tennis with the serves swinging wide outside the tramlines to opponents’ backhands. On average players will only ever meet a lefty about 12 per cent of the time.
That figure however seems bigger in tennis and this year Kerber has already defeated three lefties in Laura Robson, Varvara Lepchenko and Japan’s Misaki Doi.
“I mean, I’m doing everything with my right hand. Also football, everything right. But, I don’t know, tennis, it’s left,” she explained.
Kerber captured her maiden Grand Slam title earlier this year at the Australian Open, where she defeated Serena Williams. Her previous two best results at Grand Slams were semifinal appearances at the 2011 US Open and 2012 Wimbledon and so far she is the only one of the four players left to advance to the sem-final without dropping a set.
“I’m looking forward to playing against her, said Kerber. “I will just try to play like in the last matches, being aggressive, my game.” In the other semi-final world number one Serena Williams meets the unseeded Elena Vesina ranked at 50, both of them right-handed.
