Evergreen Venus Williams defies the odds to keep Australian Open dream alive

It is perhaps not so surprising that the first women’s semi-final will be an all-American affair, given that they started out with 18 players in the draw.

But who would have expected one of the survivors to be Venus Williams, a 36-year-old who is constantly battling an incurable auto-immune condition?

Williams outpunched the heavy-hitting Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova on Tuesday in straight sets, thus becoming the oldest woman ever to reach this stage of the Australian Open.

Surprisingly, she has not been this far in Melbourne since 2003, the year she lost to sister Serena in the final.

Like Roger Federer’s equally fairy-tale run to the last four, Williams arrived in Australia with no form or match practice behind her. She had played only a single match at the Auckland Classic before withdrawing because of pain in her serving arm, and she had few expectations of a lengthy stay here.

“I had a lot of anxiety coming into this event,” she said on Tuesday after ousting Pavlyuchenkova by a 6-4, 7-6 scoreline. “More than anything, you don't want to look silly out there, walk out on the court and just not play well because you just aren't prepared.

 “It was definitely not an ideal road to start the year. No matches, withdrawing with injury. It's stressful. Then to be sitting here, I'm like, ‘All right, it's all good.’ But to me, the semi-final is a stepping-stone, just like the other rounds. It's an opportunity to advance.”

Another comparison with Federer lies in Williams’s knack for keeping the points short. Anything over half-a-dozen shots begins to play into the hands of her younger opponents, because her footwork is not quite as electric as it used to be. If anything, though, this urgency makes her even more intimidating. As Pavlyuchenkova said yesterday, “She wasn't giving me much of a rhythm because she was either making winners or easy mistakes.”

This pattern may change against Coco Vandeweghe in Thuesday’s semi-final, however. Because here we will have a pair of sudden-death specialists, looking to outdraw each other like gunslingers at the OK Corral. Vandeweghe leads the charts for most clean winners at this tournament, with 172 from five matches, and she struck the ball so mightily on Tuesday that the reigning French Open champion Garbine Muguruza was often little more than a spectator.

As Muguruza put it, at the end of her 6-4, 6-0 defeat, “When you have an opponent that is playing like this, sees the ball super big, finds the court everywhere, there's really nothing you can do.”

At 25, Vandeweghe is young enough to have sought – and received – a Venus Williams autograph as a child. But she is also a relatively late developer, having spent most of her time at Futures and Challenger events until around three years ago.

Vandeweghe – who took out world No. 1 and defending champion Angelique Kerber in the fourth round - comes from an interesting family. Her grandmother was a beauty queen, winning the Miss America pageant in 1952, while her uncle Kiki played basketball in the NBA for 14 years and her mother Tauna swam backstroke at the 1976 Olympics.

“It's a very competitive family,” said Vandeweghe, “whether it's just playing cards around the table, or if it does end up coming to sports. I did get schooled in the pool by my mom quite a few times trying to be a smart kind of individual.

“Venus was already a great player when I asked for an autograph,” added Vandeweghe. “It’s a dream to play someone you grew up watching. But to do it at this stage of a grand slam is kind of crazy. To have two Americans against each other in the semi-final I think is pretty cool.”