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It was a nonstop slugfest, never less than compelling.
It featured an incredible 13 breaks of serve and at the end it was the German left-hander Angelique Kerber who emerged, part joyful, part shell shocked, as a 7-5, 7-6(2) winner of a memorable quarter-final against Simona Halep of Romania.
There will be much head-scratching among the statisticians searching for any previous occasion which featured eight consecutive breaks of serve, as happened in the first set of this match, but both players put this freak down to the fact that they returned at a high level rather than served poorly.
But certainly, Kerber admitted, she could never remember having previously won a match in which she dropped serve six times.
So now Kerber needs to defeat both Venus and, potentially, Serena Williams if she is to add the Wimbledon title to the Australian one she captured in January, by defeating Serena as it happens.
Exciting prospect? “That’s still far away, she smiled. “Right now I’m just thinking about my next opponent, my next match. Then we will see what happens.”
Kerber is No.4 seed here, and Halep No.5. So the prospect was for a close contest, and that is what happened. Kerber won the opening game to love but then the match entered a surreal phase of incredibly hard hitting from both players which left a string of eight service games in ruins.
Finally Halep held serve for the first time to level at 5-5, which stimulated Kerber to fresh levels of ferocity as she held serve to love and took the set after 40 minutes by breaking again, courtesy of a Halep double fault.
Normality was restored briefly in the second set but Halep’s tactic of slowing her serve right down, sometimes as low as 60 miles an hour in a bid to counter the German power backfired as Kerber broke to love to lead 4-2, triggering another cascade of four breaks of serve.
Kerber served for the match at 5-4, only to commit a trio of errors, but when it came to the tie-break she unveiled a fresh level of energy and took impressive command, winning it 7-2.
“I’m feeling really good, playing good tennis right now,” she said. “I’m playing like in Australia, really high-class tennis.”
As for the prospect of facing the elder Williams sister next, Kerber said, “She is always dangerous on grass and has a lot of confidence right now. But I am going to continue being aggressive.”
Halep thinks her conqueror has “a great chance to win because she’s fighting until the end, she’s strong in the legs.”
She might have added, confident in the mind, too.
