Silky Serena sets up Mauresmo clash

Top seed Serena Williams produced her best tennis in the last year to see off Jennifer Capriati in a totally one-sided 6-1, 6-1 thrashing.

Top seed and defending champion Serena Williams produced her best tennis in the last year to see off the challenge of old rival Jennifer Capriati in the Wimbledon quarter-finals on Wednesday.

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The younger of the two Americans won 6-1, 6-1 in a disappointingly one-sided 45-minute encounter that bore little resemblance to their 15 previous encounters, which were all tightly-fought affairs.

Williams will next go up against the woman many see as the main threat to her bid to win three in a row, France's Amelie Mauresmo who blew hot and cold in defeating Argentina's Paola Suarez 6-0, 7-5, 6-1.

"That's the best I have played since last year's Wimbledon," said Williams, who was out of the game for eight months after the knee surgery that followed her win here last year.

"I just had to come out strong and smoking. It's been a hard last 12 months for me and I am feeling really good for the first time. I am bending for balls and I am not having any pain."

A despondent Capriati said that Williams had simply been too good for her.

"The early break got her going and she got on a roll after that. That's probably the best she has ever played against me," she said.

"Her game plan was just to tee off on everything and not let me into it. Beating her the last two times she had a vendetta to come out and beat me."

Williams, who had yet to drop a set, but was still searching for her best tennis, clicked into gear right away breaking Capriati in the second game of the match on her fifth break point on a double fault.

She had Capriati scurrying hopelessely from side to side with her heavier groundstrokes and broke her serve the two following times to take the first set 6-1 in a rapid 24 minutes.

Capriati's hopes further nosedived as she lost her serve in the second game of the second set to go 2-0 down, but she was given a moment's relief in the following game when back-to-back double faults from Williams made it 2-1.

But it was to no avail as Williams broke the Capriati serve for the fifth time in a row, this time to love in the following game.

Williams then plunged the knife in easily winning the next three games against an increasingly despairing Capriati, who at 28 may have seen her last realistic chance of winning Wimbledon vanish.

There was rarely a hint of an upset in the first set of the Mauresmo-Suarez tie as the French woman totally dominated against the little South American claycourter who had made the last eight for the first time in 10 appearances.

Behind her powerful serve and heavy groundstrokes, Mauresmo belied her slow-starter reputation by imposing her game on her much smaller opponent.

She rattled off the first six games in a row to win the first set to love.

Suarez, the No.1 ranking doubles player in the world, got some sympathetic applause from a sparse No.1 Court crowd by winning her first game on serve in the second game of the second set.

That appeared to settle down Suarez and after a sequence of service-dominated games, she stunned Mauresmo by breaking her serve to lead lead 4-3.

She failed to confirm the break in her following serve but with Mauresmo reluctant to take the initiative by leaving her baseline, Suarez started to dictate the pace of the game.

Suarez broke the Mauresmo serve again to lead 6-5 and she then levelled the tie at one set all on her second set point.

Three service breaks in a row at the start of the decider left Mauresmo 3-1 ahead and firmly back in control as she finally decided to attack the net more regularly.

The French woman rattled off the next three games to set up another crack at Williams who has dominated her to date in the Grand Slam events.

"I had some trouble in the second set and I got a bit scared, but I stepped it up again in the third," said Mauresmo. "Serena is playing well to win like that (against Capriati) so we will see."

The other of Thursday's semi-finals, decided on Tuesday, sees the 1999 champion Lindsay Davenport of the United States go up against 17-year-old Russian starlet Maria Sharapova.