WOMEN'S SEMI-FINALS:OF THE last four names in the draw, only one is not an aberration. Discussion at the championships is whether it's a good thing that three players could blaze a comet trail into the last four and possibly not be seen again at this stage of a major.

Serena Williams’s opponent, Petra Kvitova, had never won a tour match on grass before Wimbledon and had never been beyond the fourth round of any Grand Slam. She had been unable to win consecutive matches since a tournament in Memphis in February but on an unfamiliar surface she then won her way through five rounds.

The 12 times Grand Slam champion Williams, however, has already gone a set up before a ball is played. Kvitova was asked if she could beat the American in today’s semi-final, dazzle the world and become a Wimbledon champion. But that concept could not be accommodated by the disarmingly honest 20-year-old, ranked 62 in the world.

“No, I don’t think so, no,” she said after surviving five match points in the quarter-final and falling past the tape. Too much schooling in honesty there, you might think, as Kvitova declined to trash-talk Williams or promote her own game. Nor did she have any pretensions of emulating compatriot Martina Navratilova, a left-hander like herself and the last lefty to win Wimbledon, in 1990.

“She is a legend. She was my idol when I was a small child,” said Kvitova, who has met Williams once before – at this year’s Australian Open, where she lost 6-2, 6-1.

But Williams will be still raw about what happened to older sister Venus against Tsvetana Pironkova. Whether Serena, who is now 28 years old and calling herself a veteran, can self-destruct to the degree Venus did is unlikely. She may also predict that the younger player will do one of two things, completely implode or hit the ball like there is no tomorrow.

“She’s a very, very good player. I lost against her in Australia,” said Kvitova. “It was very quick. I’m not the favourite so I can play my game and enjoy.”

If either Kvitova or the 82nd-ranked Pironkova, who meets world number 21 Vera Zvonareva in the other semi-final, were to win they would be the lowest-ranked Wimbledon finalists since computer rankings were introduced in 1975. The last unseeded player to reach a Grand Slam final was Justine Henin on the comeback trail this year in Australia, but an unseeded player has never reached the final at Wimbledon.

Zvonareva is favourite to make it a Saturday date with Williams on Centre Court, although the form book has been so comprehensively discredited that predicting the outcome is folly.

The 25-year-old Russian has the best pedigree of the three outsiders and made it to the fourth round of this year’s Australian Open and the semi-final the year before.

She played the Bulgarian Pironkova in Moscow last year and lost to her.

“She’s an all-over-the-court player. It’s hard to predict what she’s doing. She can slice. She can hit the ball. She can play slow. She can play fast. You never know what to expect so you can lose your rhythm,” said Zvonareva.

That’s what Pironkova did to Venus Williams and it handsomely contributed towards ushering the five times winner out of the competition.

Kvitova might just throw the kitchen sink at world number one Williams to break her tempo, upset momentum and fracture the match enough to frustrate the clearly stronger player.

One thing is certain. If Serena loses talk will collect around whether this is the beginning of the end of the Williams dominance. It has prematurely begun already.

“I don’t know, they’re still doing pretty well,” said Pironkova. “But you know at one point it will end. I guess it may be soon.”

With the family name at stake, probably not just yet.