Garbine Muguruza won her second Grand Slam in style on Saturday afternoon when she beat Venus Williams 7-5 and 6-0 in the women’s final on Saturday.
The meeting of the 23-year-old Spaniard and the 37-year-old American had been expected to be a tight battle between two ferocious ball-strikers, but after a tense first set the match became a brutally one-sided contest as Garbine Muguruza won in just 77 minutes. Muguruza overwhelmed Williams with a supreme display of power hitting on Centre Court to become only the second Spanish woman to win Wimbledon.
This was Williams’ 16th Grand Slam final and ninth at the All England Club. Williams was bidding for her sixth title at the grass-court major, 17 years after her first. In the first set she was so close to gaining the upper hand against Garbine Muguruza, holding two set points at 5-4 in the opener, but Muguruza fought those off and never looked back.
In the second set Muguruza kept her nerve as Williams seemed to lose her concentration with the Spaniard putting her to the sword with a 6-0 win to take her second Grand Slam since her win at Roland Garros last year.
In Muguruza’s first Grand Slam final at Wimbledon in 2015, she lost to Williams’ younger sister, Serena. In her second Grand Slam final at the French Open last year, Garbine Muguruza again faced Serena and won. That was the most recent final Muguruza had played in at any tournament until Saturday, an indication of the sort of up-and-down 12 months she’s had. With the victory on Saturday she can boast as the only woman to beat each of the Williams sisters in a major final.
It was an anticlimactic conclusion to the fortnight for Williams, Wimbledon’s oldest female finalist since Martina Navratilova, 37, was the runner-up to Martinez in 1994. Despite losing the American said she had enjoyed beautiful moments in the last couple of weeks.