Venus crushes Safina to set up all-Williams final

By James Christie.

Venus Williams made a mockery of the ranking system to destroy world number one Dinara Safia and book a date with sister Serena in Saturday's Wimbledon final.

If you wanted to know just how dominant she was you only needed to look at the scoreboard as the players shook hands at the end - the 6-1, 6-0 result said it all.

Safina hit her 32nd double fault of the championships - almost half of them came in her quarter-final - as she lost the first five games of the match to the number three seed.

Williams's fine play included a 124mph serve - it was in, of course - equalling the fastest one ever recorded by a woman at Wimbledon.

Her stony-faced expression showed that winning the match meant far more to her than the data recorded on the speed gun.

Serving with rows of empty green seats behind Safina managed to avoid the 'bagel' but after 26 minutes she found herself one set down, having won just a single game.

Sadly for her the strategy of walking slowly between points seeming to offer the best prospect of extending the match beyond the hour mark.

Broken at the first time of asking in the second set the Russian showed no sign of making any impact on the Venus serve, overhitting forehands and netting backhands as her opponent took advantage of some dreadful inconsistency.

Safina did manage to reach deuce on her own serve in the fifth game but that's about as good as it got for her.

The next game saw the defending champion hit winner number 16 to clinch the second set without the loss of a game.

Her sister Serena will think she has a chance of defeating her in the final as her semi-final against Elena Dementieva was so much tougher than this one.

Venus will think that she has a chance of recording three Wimbledon titles in a row because she hasn't dropped a set the entire tournament.

With this 'contest' being so one-sided she will have plenty of energy left in reserve come Saturday afternoon.