The opening act of Serena Williams’s comeback was all about how quickly she could find her game, having not competed for a year.
Pretty fast, as it turned out. A dramatic opening-round victory in the doubles at Eastbourne, where Williams is playing alongside Ons Jabeur ahead of her singles return at Wimbledon, offered ample reassurance that the champion of 23 majors had not suddenly forgotten how to play tennis, even if it did take her a set or so to get going.
In act two, the focus shifted to whether Williams could still deliver on the big points. It is a knack that all great champions have, and few more so than the American, whose huge serve and powerful groundstrokes have so often come to her aid when she most needed them.
The answer was delivered, emphatically, early in the second set against Japan’s Shuko Aoyama and Chan Hao-ching of Chinese Taipei, doubles specialists who both have experience at the business end of grand slams.
As Williams faced her first break points of the match at 15-40, a 111mph ace flew past Aoyama. Then it was Chan’s turn to look on helplessly as two consecutive deliveries, slightly slower but devastating in their accuracy, sizzled into the backstop. When the pair had the temerity to fashion a fourth opportunity, Williams’s riposte was the same.
Four break points faced, four aces delivered. Those seeking chinks in the 40-year-old’s armour would need to look elsewhere.
“I feel like I’ve been serving well, so that’s been really good,” said Williams after partnering Jabeur to a 6-2, 6-4 victory. “I’ve been working really hard on that. I have been returning well, even though I missed a lot today, but the young ladies were serving really well, the ball was staying lower.”
Williams’s assessment felt overly self-critical, certainly relative to her performance against Marie Bouzkova and Sara Sorribes Tormo the previous evening. Her return game was noticeably sharper – as it needed to be in the face of the livewire movement of Aoyama, whose tireless efforts to intercept offered a constant threat – and she was bolder and more decisive at the net. As Aoyoma prowled the forecourt with intent, Williams, herself a 14-time major winner and triple Olympic champion in doubles, responded with a few interceptions of her own as she and Jabeur broke the Japanese player in the third game, establishing a momentum they would never relinquish.
Jabeur, ranked third in singles but less experienced as a doubles player, has likewise grown in stature over the course of the two matches. Familiarity breeds content in this discipline, and here the scratch pairing looked a lot more in harmony than they had done in their opener, with the Tunisian significantly more assured on serve.
“I’m learning from the best how to serve much better,” smiled Jabeur after Williams had dubbed their budding partnership “Onsrena”. “Today I did good serves. I think I’m getting better with the serve and I’m honestly enjoying playing doubles more and more.”
That pleasure showed as Jabeur played the point of the match to secure a break in the ninth game of the second set, haring back to retrieve a seemingly unreachable lob. Her momentum sent her thudding into the backstop, but she turned and played a jumping crosscourt backhand that clipped the line and prised an error from Chan.
Williams duly served out to love to secure a place in the semi-finals, where she and Jabeur will face Aleksandra Krunic of Serbia and Poland’s Magda Linette.
“It was good match play and good match practice, which is exactly what I needed and what I wanted to do coming here, so I couldn’t have asked for more,” said Williams.