Serena's progress anything but serene

TENNIS:OCCASIONALLY SERENA Williams makes her case awkwardly, chooses the wrong time to say the right words, or fails to show grace in defeat. Sometimes she can't help herself, can't disguise the enduring need to win tennis matches.

Her relationship with the Wimbledon crowd is mixed, although, in truth, fans at the All England club are a forgiving bunch and few players are ever really disliked.

Yesterday after her first round match, the Williams façade of never letting the world in crumbled after a tough toe-to-toe with Aravane Rezai on Centre Court. In only her second tournament since recovering from a serious foot injury when she severed a tendon on a piece of broken glass and then suffered a blood clot on her lungs, Williams burst into tears.

It has been a long 12 months for the American, time to consider approaching 30 years of age (in September) and a career moving into the twilight, time to consider her mortality – if she hadn’t already after her sister Yetunde was gunned down in 2003.

After dropping the second set 6-3 to take it to a third against the world number 61, Williams rallied for a spirited win 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 before bursting into tears.

Rezai, who had only won five matches in 12 tournaments this year, has a father who is banned from the tour after threatening her boyfriend during this year’s Australian Open. Everyone has their issues.

But Rezai gave the 29-year-old four-time Wimbledon champion a challenging afternoon, starting with a quality first game that lasted 10 minutes and saw Williams concede four break points on her famously dangerous serve.

But when Rezai’s serve fell apart in the fourth game, dropping to just a 50 per cent success rate, Williams was up and running.

The second set saw the American falter. A little anxious, ring rusty too after the long lay off, but, as ever, the Williams reserves and unwillingness to lose as much as any desire to win, came through with a dominant third set that lasted just 25 minutes.

“Well, uhm, I didn’t expect to have any emotions,” she said afterwards. It was after all just a first round match.

“I just expected to, you know, walk off. But I was pretty excited. I just thought about all the things that were happening, me not being here. Wasn’t necessarily expecting to come to Wimbledon this year. Making it and winning was pretty cool. It definitely hit me at the end of the match. I’m not a crier, so I don’t know. I think it was something in my eyes at one point, but . . .

“It was so emotional for me because, you know, throughout the last 12 months, I’ve been through, you know, a lot of things that’s not normal, things you guys don’t even know about. So it’s just been a long, arduous road. To stand up still is pretty awesome.

“I learned that, you know, you can never take any moment for granted. I’ve been doing so much just to try to appreciate every moment. When things happen, you appreciate people that are around you or people that may not be around you. It’s eye-opening as well as it makes you really tough.”

A little more ice and much less fire and emotion was Caroline Wozniacki’s prescription for first round success.

The world number one, who has not yet won a Grand Slam, confined her Spanish opponent, Arantxa Para Santonja, to just three games in a match that fell into her lap with some ease. In many respects it was the perfect opener for the number one who plays her first Wimbledon with the number one status.

But Wozniacki is also increasingly under pressure to gild her league table standing of number one with a major win. After the match she was asked just that and gave a terse enough answer to suggest she wasn’t best pleased with the impertinence of the question.

“No, it doesn’t, I just go out there and play,” she said on the thorny issue of her unembellished crown.

Discussion closed. Well, for the time being.

At least the Danish player has the comfort of her hotel room and a place in the second round, while Serbia’s Jelena Jankovic continues to slip out of view. Jankovic could tell Wozniacki some tales about the perils of being at the top after she went crashing out 5-7, 6-4, 6-3 to Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez.

Formerly the world number one, Jankovic has traditionally struggled on grass and had never gone beyond the fourth round.

While there was little to choose between the pair in the first two sets, each of which stretched to 50 minutes, Martinez Sanchez took control in the third set and held her nerve to close out the match, stunning a disconsolate Jankovic.