Internet Desk: Defending champion Serena Williams will play Angelique Kerber in the women’s singles final at Wimbledon on Saturday.
Six-time champion Serena, 34, thrashed Russia’s Elena Vesnina 6-2 6-0 in 48 minutes to reach her ninth final.
Fourth-seeded German Kerber, 28, prevented a fifth all-Williams final by beating Serena’s older sister Venus, who was badly out of sorts, 6-4 6-4.
In January, the left-handed Kerber beat Serena in the Australian Open finalfor her first Grand Slam title.
Serena, who is bidding to match Steffi Graf’s open era record of 22 Grand Slam singles title, simply had too much firepower for her unseeded opponent.
Vesnina, a two-time Grand Slam champion in doubles, looked overawed from the outset, losing the first four games.
The world number 50, playing in her first Grand Slam singles semi-final, rallied but still lost the first set in 28 minutes.
Things got even worse for Vesnina in the second set, the 29-year-old simply unable to deal with the Serena serve, which yielded only three points in the match.
Venus, who last won the title in 2008, was appearing in her first Grand Slam semi-final since the 2010 US Open and was the oldest major semi-finalist since Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon in 1994.
Five-time champion Venus fell out of the world’s top 100 in 2011 after being diagnosed with the immune system disorder Sjogren’s syndrome.
And the eighth seed looked fatigued throughout, dropping her serve four times in the first set and also in the first game of the second.
Kerber continued to take advantage of Venus’ misfiring forehand, wrapping things up in one hour and 12 minutes to reach her first Wimbledon final.