But she refused to use fatigue as an excuse for her loss.
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The 10th-seeded Pliskova will meet second-seeded Angelique Kerber, who rolled past unseeded Caroline Wozniacki by a 6-4, 6-3 score in the second women’s semifinal.
Williams won the next point, but double faulted to make it 4-all and gave Pliskova her first match point when she sent a backhand out on 5-all. I knew it would be tough because I know Pliskova has been playing very good in the last few weeks.
“I was watching the match a little bit before I came here but I was trying to focus on this match, not the match before”, Kerber said. It turns out that Williams was suffering from a bad left knee that slowed her down throughout the night.
“To be honest, I don’t remember that”, Williams said of the early miscues.
“So many simple, simple shots that I easily could have made”. Kerber becomes the first German woman to reach the No.1 ranking since her idol Graf in 1997. She will now face Pliskova in the final. She had seven aces and hung in there in the second set when Williams tried to rally.
She remains tied with Steffi Graf for both Grand Slam titles, and the WTA record of 186 successive weeks as world number one.
Pliskova became the fourth woman to beat the Williams sisters in the same Grand Slam event, having taken out Venus in the fourth round, which she said prepared her for the Serena match. “I’m a professional player, been playing for over 20 years”, Williams said.
“Here I have one day off so I can really prepare for the final against Pliskova”. “Sometimes it is like this”.
“After that (loss at Cincinnati Masters), I was just telling myself, ‘OK, I will get one more chance”.
“If someone is not ready and she doesn’t think she is ready, she should not go on the court”.
Williams had to back up from her three-set quarter-final win against Romania’s Simona Halep yesterday, and has to call the trainer out during today’s match to work on her leg.
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That also goes for a 23rd Grand Slam championship, another record that Williams will have to be patient for, and one that she failed to capture in 2015 when she lost to Roberta Vinci, ending her “hopes of a rare calendar-year slam”, CNN reported. “To be now the No.1 in the world, that was always a dream for me”, she informed. That result meant that Kerber will rise to the WTA top ranking next week. “I really had some chances there and I didn’t take them, and I let that get the better of me”.
