Venus, Serena to face each other for the fourth time in Wimbledon final

WIMBLEDON, England — Richard Williams refuses to watch his daughters Venus and Serena play each other. Says he simply can't bear to see it, no matter the setting, no matter the stage.

So once again, the patriarch of the greatest sister act in tennis history is heading home to the United States before the Wimbledon final. That's because the women's singles championship at the All England Club is Venus Williams vs. Serena Williams for the second year in a row and fourth time overall.

The way the sisters won in Thursday's semifinals could hardly have been more different.

"Serena nearly gave me a heart attack," Dad said. "Venus played as if she had some place to go, and she was in a major league hurry to get a great dinner."

Serena went on Centre Court first and came within a point of losing to Beijing Olympics gold medalist Elena Dementieva before grunting and grinding her way to a 6-7 (4), 7-5, 8-6 victory that lasted 2 hours, 49 minutes — longer than any Wimbledon women's semifinal or final on record.

"Definitely one of my more dramatic victories," said Serena, who walloped a tournament-high 20 aces. "I felt like I was down pretty much the whole match."

Venus followed and dominated the No. 1-ranked woman, Dinara Safina, in an astonishingly easy 6-1, 6-0 win that took merely 51 minutes and equaled the most lopsided semifinal result here over the last 74 years.

"The score just showed my level of play," the third-seeded Venus said. "I was just dictating on every point."

In Saturday's final, Venus will be trying to win her sixth Wimbledon and eighth Grand Slam title. Serena will be trying to win her third Wimbledon and 11th Grand Slam title.

It's the eighth all-Williams major final (Serena leads 5-2) and their 21st meeting on tour (they're tied 10-all).

"The more we play, the better it gets. When we play our match on Saturday, it's for everything. This is what we dreamed of when we were growing up in Compton, 20-something years ago," Serena said. "This is what we worked for, and this is what we want. Like, I wanted her to win today, and she wanted me to win today."

Venus has won 20 consecutive matches at Wimbledon; if she makes that 21, she will become the first woman since Steffi Graf in 1991-93 to win the tournament three straight years. Today, the day before they face off for the singles title, the sisters will wake up at the house they're sharing during the tournament and head to the All England Club to play as a pair in the doubles semifinals, an event they won last year.

Serena nearly didn't make it. Seeded second, she hadn't lost a set all tournament, yet found herself trailing the fourth-seeded Dementieva. The Russian is often pointed to as the best player without a Grand Slam title. If isn't her, it's probably Safina.

Men's semifinals today

The current edition of Wimbledon is the 23rd Grand Slam tournament since Andy Roddick won his lone major championship at the 2003 U.S. Open.

He badly wants to win a second.

It's why he changed coaches for this season. Slimmed down. Put in as much work as ever in practice, striving to improve his returns, his backhands, his volleys.

Add it all up, and the sixth-seeded American is back in the Wimbledon semifinals for the first time since 2005, facing No. 3-seeded Andy Murray of Britain today. Roger Federer — seeking a sixth Wimbledon championship and record 15th Grand Slam title — faces No. 24 Tommy Haas of Germany in the other semifinal.

"Andymonium" has hit the All England Club, but don't think Roddick is happy merely to be a part of it.

"By no means is he satisfied, because the whole gig when he hired me is we've got to win a Slam," Roddick's coach, Larry Stefanki, said. "I said, 'That's what I'm here for.' Winning a Slam is what it's all about. Coming in second is like kissing your sister. And he knows that he's already won one. Nothing is going to suffice. Even if you get to the final, it won't do."

Roddick's major title, not quite six years ago, was also the last at any Grand Slam event for an American man, the country's longest drought in the Open era, which began in 1968.

Murray is trying to become the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936.

No British man has won any Grand Slam championship since Perry at the U.S. Open later that year.

So the buzz builds with each victory by Murray. The 22-year-old from Scotland wrote on Twitter about the good-luck note he received from Queen Elizabeth II — everyone in Britain wants to know whether she'll show up in the Royal Box if Murray reaches Sunday's final — and the phone call he got from actor Sean Connery.

"It doesn't make any difference the way you perform, the hype. If you ... spend a lot of time reading the papers, watching everything on the TV, all the things that are getting said on the radio, then you get caught up in it," said Murray, the runner-up to Federer at last year's U.S. Open. "If you ignore it, you don't realize it's happening."

Murray is 6-2 against Roddick, including a lopsided victory in their most recent meeting, in the final of a hard-court tournament at Doha, Qatar, in January.

That was Stefanki's first tournament with Roddick and expects Friday's encounter to look different.

"It wasn't pretty. That tactic won't be used again. It was a very aggressive, offensive, bring-out-the-bugle-and-charge," Stefanki said. "And this guy is like (Mats) Wilander or (Bjorn) Borg — you give him a target and he's going to pass you, lob you, dink you, because he's a great mover off the ball."

This match could be decided by Roddick's serve against Murray's returns. Roddick pounded 43 aces past 2002 Wimbledon champion Lleyton Hewitt in Wednesday's quarterfinals, and he acknowledged that Murray is "certainly in the conversation among the best returners."

Roddick will have his new wife, his trainer and Stefanki in his corner Friday. Murray, meanwhile, will have roughly 15,000 supporters at Centre Court.

"It will certainly be something to remember. I think the crowd's going to be electric. I think it's going to be a great atmosphere, and one that I can certainly appreciate, even if it's not for me," Roddick said. "I'm just going to pretend when they say, 'Come on, Andy!' that they mean me."

Murray was the only British man or woman to get past the second round in singles and will be playing in his first Wimbledon semifinal.

Federer will be attempting to get to a record seventh consecutive Wimbledon final and record 20th career Grand Slam final. His match against Haas is the Swiss star's 21st Grand Slam semifinal in a row, extending a record he already owned.

"The consistency, right there, in the big tournaments is ridiculous," Murray said. "You know, no one will ever match that, I don't think."

By winning the French Open last month, Federer completed a career Grand Slam and tied Pete Sampras with 14 major championships.

Sampras has not said whether he'll show up if Federer has a chance to break that tie Sunday. Past performances certainly indicate Federer should be there.

After all, he is 19-3 in Grand Slam semifinals, and Haas is 0-3. Plus, Federer leads Haas 9-2 head-to-head, including a big comeback June 1 in the fourth round of the French Open, where the German took the first two sets and was five points from victory.

Federer, of course, came back.

"I stayed calm and I knew that if the match was going to swing around that it was going to be really difficult for him. It's exactly what happened," Federer said. "But new match, new tournament. We'll see what happens."

AP-ES-07-02-09 1438EDT