DOHA (AFP) — Venus Williams won her biggest title outside of Wimbledon for seven years when she captured the WTA Tour's year-end event for the first time here on Sunday.
Williams' 6-7 (5/7), 6-0, 6-2 win over Vera Zvonareva, the week's surprise packet, in the final of the Sony Ericsson championships, proved that she is still a major force on surfaces other than grass.
Although the five times Wimbledon champion was often not at her best, and somtimes laboured to impose her heavy game on her opponent, there was no doubting her fight or her ability to figure out a way to win.
She also proved to have the greater stamina because well before the end Zvonareva, who has clocked up 27 matches since the US Open and played eight tournaments in nine weeks, was spent.
Near the end she collapsed on the ground and burst into sobbing, apparently because of the exhaustion which was diminishing her brilliantly rhythmic ground strokes.
"It was a hard fought match right down to the end," reckoned Williams, though that hardly looked the case. "I am so excited. I wanted it so bad."
Asked how she recovered from her first set setback, when she had a long lead in the tie-break only to lose it and then lose the set on an unlucky net cord, Williams said: "That's tennis.
"Sometimes it goes your way and then all of a sudden in comes crashing down.
"It's been a pretty good year for me. Next year I hope I can stay healthy and I can go higher," added Venus, who will finish the year as world number six. Zvonareva will be seven, her highest ever.
Williams began sluggishly, perhaps suffering lingering effects from the tough match in which she beat world number one Jelena Jankovic the previous day.
She lacked penetration off the ground, and the more she sought to generate pace, the noisier she became with her gasp-grunts.
Zvonareva applied the majority of her attacks to the Venus backhand wing, but switched the ball around well too, looking the fresher and livelier player.
The lesser known player was also helped by an early double fault from the Wimbledon champion - a more frequent problem this week than she would have liked - which contributed to the loss of her first service game.
Zvonareva capitalised to reach 3-0 after a long struggled in the third game, and then held the advantage more comfortably to 5-3.
It was then that she showed, for the first time in five matches of the most impressive week of her career, an inhibition about winning. She failed to convert four set points on her serve, one of them an error from a very makable volley, dropped that game and was taken to a tie-break.
It was not till she was down by five points to one in this that Zvonareva's game started to recover. With the set apparently gone she relaxed into the swing of her ground strokes more, got back to 5-5, and was donated another Williams double fault to gain her fifth set point.
This one she converted with a net cord which fell dead. But in the second set Zvonareva's luck was not in.
She encountered a quite different Williams, who found the depth and the angles better and made better tactical choices, getting to the net twice successfully to help break Zvonareva's serve for 2-0.
Zvonareva was no longer able to push Williams around and lost her serve twice more quickly as her level dropped. The set lasted less than half an hour.
It caused Zvonareva to slam the ball away in fury at one stage, and later to take a heavy swipe at her kitbag as she walked back to her place. And in the third set there were further oubursts.
By this stage it was evident that her game had lost its sting, and her one brief moment when it seemed as though she might repair an early break against her, at 2-4, 30-all saw her project a desultory drop shot into the net.
Two games earlier during the bout of sobbing, she had sat on the court and thwacked her foot fiercely with her racket, but the Russian regained her composure ultimately.
"I think I could have done better but I had a great time with five matches against top ten players," the Russian said.
"It's the first time I have played so many matches in a row against top ten players and so that was pretty good." Her 715,000 dollars pay day was by far her biggest, while Williams' 1,340,000 first prize takes her into fourth place in the list all-time highest money earners, overtaking Martina Navratilova.
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