Venus moves closer to Serena meeting

DUBAI: Venus Williams moved to within one win of a possible semi-final against her younger sister Serena after beating one of the tour's most spectac
ularly rising players in Dubai on Wednesday.

The Wimbledon champion scored an impressively solid win over Alize Cornet, a 19-year-old from Nice who has risen more than 50 places in little more than a year to within one slot of the world's top ten. After an absorbing first set, Venus made light of the threat, imposed her forceful game upon the tactical patterns which Cornet tried to create, and made many more forays to the net than she used to, eventually winning by a slightly misleading 6-3, 6-1. If she gets past Elena Dementieva, the Russian fourth seed who ousted Spanish 14th seed Anabel Medina Garrigues 6-1, 6-3, Venus will go toe to toe with her sister, the world number one. The key moments came after Venus had broken Cornet's service for 4-2 - causing the French player to launch a ball angrily up into the air - and Cornet broke back spiritedly in the next game, which had several deuces. She used slow, loopy drives, and mixed up the pace and the direction, and ensured that Venus had a high ratio of forehands in the mix. Had Cornet consolidated for 4-4, the outcome might have been different. But after getting to 40-30, she was unable to make a pass when Venus gambled on getting to the net, and after three deuces and several good rallies, Cornet lost her serve again. Venus closed out the set without fuss, and the mood changed, with the sixth seeded player taking seven games out of eight, accelerating the pace of her attacks and swelling in confidence. Cornet may have been increasingly bothered by a shoulder problem. "I missed a few shots long and I was upset about that, but I was able to improve," said Venus. "I was good at the net and, yes, I like it up there." Serena was due on for the last match of the night session to play Zheng Jie, the Chinese player who reached the Wimbledon semi-finals seven months ago. Another leading contender, Ana Ivanovic, the French Open champion, also came through, but after leading by a set and 5-3 had to work harder than expected against Camille Pin, who only got into the tournament as a lucky loser. "I started really well but in the second set I started pulling back a little bit on my shots, and got a little but frustrated," said Ivanovic after her 6-2, 7-6 (7/5) win. "She's the kind of opponent who moves really well," said Ivanovic of the world number 61 from Aix-en-Provence. "But the balls were coming at me a little slower and then you have to through the ball more." Earlier, there were two retirements, shortening the schedule, and causing the match between Olympic champion Elena Dementieva and Anabel Medina Garrigues to be switched the centre court to fill the gap. First Marion Bartoli quit with blisters on both feet while trailing 2-5 against Vera Zvonareva, the world number five from Russia, and then Dominika Cibulkova, the 12th-seeded Slovakian, retired unwell while trailing 0-4 in the final set against Elena Vesnina, an unseeded Russian.