Venus Williams essays a forehand against  Agnieszka Radwanska during their quarter-final match yesterday. At right, Spain’s Carla Suarez Navarro celebrates winning a point against top seed Petra Kvitova. Pictures: Noushad Thekkayil

By Satya Rath/Doha

It has been a recent trend in tennis where former top players are hired as coaches. In some cases it has worked too. Like Andy Murray, who managed to break his Grand Slam duck following a series of near-misses, after hiring Czech legend Ivan Lendl as coach. Roger Federer engaged Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker was picked by Novak Djokovic. The trend has been mostly confined to men’s tennis though.
Last December, Agnieszka Radwanska became the first woman player to hire a ‘super coach’ when she announced that American legend Martina Navratilova would be joining her staff.
Whether the partnership will work for the Pole is difficult to predict at this stage, but one aspect of her game has clearly improved in the last two months.
And it was more or less visible during her quarter-final clash against Venus Williams at the Qatar Total Open here yesterday. She lost the match, but won the maximum cheers from the capacity Centre Court crowd for her never-say-die spirit, which was one of the hallmarks of Navratilova’s game that saw her win 18 Grand Slam singles titles.
Going into the crunch match with a 4-6 head-to-head disadvantage—Radwanska’s most recent defeat to Venus came at last month’s Australian Open—the 25-year-old fought tooth and nail for close to two-and-a-half hours against her powerful 34-year-old opponent. In the end, Venus’ greater experience had the last say in her 6-4, 1-6, 6-3 victory.
Venus took the first set when she managed to hold her serve while breaking the Pole’s serve in the third. Radwanska came out all guns blazing in the second, breaking Venus in the second, fourth and sixth games to draw level. In the deciding third, with Venus leading 5-1 and serving for the match, the Pole threw in everything she had and took the next two games.
But Venus had just too much power in her strokes for Radwanska to stretch the match any further as she sealed her semi-final spot with three down-the-line winners in the ninth.
“She played really great, she fought hard,” Venus said in her post-match comments. “At 5-1 in the final set, I didn’t serve badly. Yes, I did hit a few second serves, but they were deep and with kick. But she just kept hitting winners. I think sometimes you just get a bit relaxed and you start to go for broke. She hit a winner off the first serve and competed well in the next game. I just tried to stay focused because obviously she wasn’t going to let up.”
Their most recent meeting before this, in the last 16 of the Australian Open, also went the distance. “It was different I guess. I think her strategy was a little bit different there, but I think this court is different as well. Every match is different and I think since she didn’t win the last match, she probably thought to come out with a little bit different strategy. I never expected this match to be easy, so I was prepared for a long haul. The key was not to lose my focus, which I think I did well.”
Venus will meet wild card Victoria Azarenka in today’s semi-finals. Belarusian Azarenka, given a wild card in Doha after an injury-ravaged 2014 season that saw her tumble down the rankings from the top to her current 48, kept her love affair with Doha going with another dominant display against third seed Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark.
Azarenka won back-to-back titles here in 2012 and 2013, and after yesterday’s win, is now on a 13-match win streak in Qatar.
The two went into yesterday’s clash level on four-all in head-to-head record, but the gap between the two was all too visible. Barring the first set, where both broke each other twice each in the first four games before Azarenka raised her game to take the set 6-3, the second set was more or less one-sided. A few disputed line calls saw Wozniacki lose her cool too, and that affected her game as the increasing number of errors showed.
Top seed Petra Kvitova, was however, knocked out in a late match by Spain’s Carla Suarez Navarro, who won 3-6, 6-0, 6-3. The Spaniard will face the winner of match between fellow Czech Lucie Safarova and world number 10 Andrea Petkovic of Germany.  
In doubles, India’s Sania Mirza and her Chinese Taipei partner Su-Wei Hsieh made light work of Dutch-Czech pairing of Michaella Krajicek and Barbora Zahlavova Strycova 6-0, 6-1 in just 48 minutes to storm into the semi-finals.

Singles (Quarter-finals)
7-V Williams (USA) bt 4-A Radwanska (POL) 6-4, 1-6, 6-3 V Azarenka (BLR) bt 3-C Wozniacki (DEN) 6-3, 6-1 9-C Suárez Navarro (ESP) bt 1-P Kvitova (CZE) 3-6, 6-0, 6-3,  
Doubles (Quarter-finals)
H Chan (TPE)/C Dellacqua (AUS) bt G Dabrowski (CAN)/M Erakovic (NZL) 6-3, 6-2   1-S Hsieh (TPE)/S Mirza (IND) bt M Krajicek (NED)/B Zahlavova Strycova (CZE) 6-0, 6-1