NEW YORK—Serena Williams often spends the first few moments of changeovers sitting in her chair with a towel draped over legs and her eyes closed in a meditative state. Undoubtedly she’s trying to relax and go over the finer points of her game plan. This tournament, however, Williams might be summoning up interest in her matches. Other than a tight second set in her fourth-rounder against Victoria Azarenka, Williams has faced little resistance, dropping 11 total games in her seven prior sets. In her quarterfinal on Thursday, 16th-seed Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova hoped to be more than another ugly statistic.
The match got off to an unusual start with the first six games going to the returner. Neither player seemed particularly comfortable, resulting in many choppy and inelegant points. But this was big babe tennis—finesse and guile were never going to be front stage. The two then exchanged a couple of service holds, with Pavlyuchenkova doing well to escape a 0-30 hole at 4-5. Williams held again—she would not be broken the rest of the match—to keep the pressure on her 20-year-old opponent. Once again, Pavlyuchenkova started the game 0-30, but this time she could not escape, dropping the set, 7-5. Williams won a scrambling set point that highlighted the major difference between the two players: both can bring it from the baseline, but Williams is the far superior mover and athlete. Once Williams got ahead in a point, Pavlyuchenkova could do little to turn the tables.
The other stark contrast was experience. The pair had played once before, a yo-yo three-setter that Williams won (6-1, 1-6, 6-2) in Paris a year ago. But this was Williams' 32nd Grand Slam quarterfinal, 30 more than Pavlyuchenkova’s haul. Her first trip was earlier this year at Roland Garros, where she squandered a 6-1, 4-1 lead to Francesca Schiavone. It was perhaps just a speed bump, as Pavlyuchenkova is the youngest player in the Top 50 with game enough to potentially have some big moments in her Grand Slam career.
The second set, unfortunately, was not one of them. Williams put her hair up in a ball to start the first game, an indication of her all-business approach. With the tight first set in her pocket, she seemed to exhale a bit and started connecting on more first serves (16 of 19) which freed up the rest of her game. (Williams had another effective serving day, winning 83 percent of first-serve points and finishing plus-six in aces-to-unforced errors; Pavlyuchenkova was minus-eight).
Williams cemented an early break to go up 3-0 and never looked back. The pair engaged in a long game when Pavlyuchenkova served at 1-4, but the Russian offered too many soft second serves that Williams punished. With the double-break in hand, Williams served out the match, which ended 7-5, 6-1.
The win puts Williams in her sixth U.S. Open semifinal and back in the Top 20. She will face the winner of world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki and 10th-seeded Andrea Petkovic. If it’s Wozniacki, it will be the match-up most have anticipated—the computer’s top player versus everyone else’s. But no matter which opponent it turns out to be, she’ll have to do something extraordinary if she hopes to break Williams out of her trance.
—Jon Levey