Martina Navratilova and Leander Paes discuss a point during their mixed doubles match against Wayne Black and Cara Black at Wimbledon on Thursday. The match was stopped because of bad light, with the score at 6-7 (7-9), 7-6 (7-5), 10-10. (AP)

Serena Williams has talked longingly of the proprietorial feeling her role model Pete Sampras had about Centre Court. She has mused that she would earn the right to enjoy that feeling, too, should she go on this year to claim her third successive Wimbledon title. Famously, Williams has never been troubled by a moment of self-doubt, and she arrived for Thursday’s semi-final with the bunting out. Fluttering around the bottom of her skirt, that is.

Defying an opponent on a mission and windy conditions that rendered her a human windmill in her jagged-hemmed dress, Williams won her place in the final after two hours and 27 minutes of compelling melodrama (as reported in Friday’s Late City edition).

It took three toughly-fought sets in which awesome power, exquisite skill, wretched errors and the odd comic effort ricocheted between her racket and that of Amelie Mauresmo, but the defending champion — tested and pushed to the limit, 6-7 (4-7), 7-5, 6-4 — earned a standing ovation from an enraptured Centre Court crowd.

In terms of pure mesmerising watchability, this was almost a women’s semi-final to match the men’s 1977 classic between Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis. That statement may stem partly from relief that the women’s game can stage epic matches after a damp squib of a run-up to the semi-final stage, but this was an encounter punctuated by sublime accuracy and finesse, with impassioned demonstrations of every shot in the book.

While Williams said “I didn’t have a game today. I only had a heart”, Mauresmo has never played better on the Grand Slam stage, and yet she left the court the picture of utter dismay: just how well do you have to play to beat Serena Williams?

“These matches are about a couple points here and there,” Mauresmo sighed afterwards. “You can’t really tell where the match was lost. It was a great match. The only bad thing was that I lost it.

“It’s never easy to lose but it shows that my game is up there, compared to a couple of years ago when I lost to Serena two and one. My game has improved a lot and I’m going to get there.”

Williams had blitzed and blinged her way through to the last four (with racket and fashion sense, respectively) without dropping a set —allowing an in-form Jennifer Capriati to collect only two games in her quarter final demolition — but Mauresmo was not prepared to see her opponent in exterminator mode again.

She has the game to test Williams to the limit. She has the aggression, the power, the extraordinary ability to retrieve the unretrievable and, given the 6-2, 6-1 humiliation wrought on her by Williams at the semi-final stage here two years ago, she had nothing to lose in going all out to take her chances.

The general consensus on Mauresmo is that her head is not as reliable as her racket arm. The very first game showed the full repertoire: she was 40-15 up on her serve courtesy of her power and guile, but double-faulted twice and netted a volley to lose the advantage and have her serve broken immediately.

The turning point in the first set came in the 10th game with Williams serving at 5-4. If anyone had doubted the American’s will to reclaim her world No 1 ranking after a tough return from knee surgery, they should have seen her bent double, fists clenched, face etched with determination after she had earned herself a first set point. Mauresmo survived that with a beautiful angled volley, and another with a glorious cross-court passing shot, and eventually managed to break serve.

“It was very exciting at that point,” said Williams. “I said to myself, ‘Okay, I lost that first set. I shouldn’t have lost the first set and if I carry on like that I could be going home’. So I kept fighting. That’s all I had —fight.”

Which she showed to electric effect. In fact, the collective power generated during the long rallies — Mauresmo having abandoned her gameplan to come into the net — could have generated electricity to supply SW19 for the next month.

“That’s the toughest match we’ve had,” added Williams