Serena tops Woz, will play Stosur in final

Serena Williams is back at the U.S. Open and back in the final, looking for her fourth title Sunday at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

With power, speed and flat out dominance, Williams defeated Caroline Wozniacki, 6-2, 6-4, Saturday night in the late semifinal, knocking out the Open's No. 1 seed and the world's No. 1 player. Williams will play Samantha Stosur, who beat Angelique Kerber, 6-3, 2-6, 6-2, in the other semi.

There was some concern when Williams took a medical timeout leading 4-1 in the first set to have the big toe on her right foot taped and massaged. It was that toe that forced her of a tournament in Cincinnati two weeks before the Open. She then broke Wozniacki for 5-1 and played a loose service game to let Wozniacki hang around. But Wozniacki, lacking any semblance of Williams' penetrating and overpowering serve, lost hers in the next game and Williams was on her way.

Williams got a break in the fourth game of the second set and served for the match at 5-3, but Wozniacki held on when Williams double faulted twice and made two careless errors. But again Wozniacki's weak serve proved her undoing, and she was broken for the match. Williams had 34 winners and 11 aces.

"I'm so happy, especially because of 9/11,'' Williams said. "I really wanted to play [Sunday] because of such a special day for the United States."

Williams is back after a two-year absence from the Open and three years since the last of her three titles in 2008. Her exit against Kim Clijsters in the 2009 semifinals came after a profane tirade against a linesperson who had called her for a foot fault on a second serve. That loss of that point, and a penalty point against her for unsportsmanlike conduct, meant that she had handed the match to Clijsters, the eventual champion. That episode seemed forgotten by the fans this year, who welcomed her back to the Open in her first match with a standing ovation.

Clijsters beat Wozniacki in the 2009 final, the only Grand Slam final Wozniacki had reached. Her No. 1 ranking was based on a slew of points for winning regular tour events, six of them this year, six last year, and she took over the No. 1 ranking last October. She won at New Haven for the fourth straight year the week before the Open.

Because Williams was out of the game since July of 2010 with injury and illness, her ranking had fallen, but two hard court wins brought it up to No. 28, which was her seeding here. No one doubted, though, that the seeding meant nothing, and Williams cruised into the semifinals without losing a set. Wozniacki had lost one set, to Svetlana Kuznetsova in the round of 16.

Williams now faces Stosur, who is trying to carve her own history. You would have to go back to 1980 to find the last Australian women's player to win a Grand Slam title. That would have been Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who won the last of her seven major titles at Wimbledon that year. Now Stosur has reached her first U.S. Open final.

Stosur beat Nadia Petrova in the third round in a match that lasted 3:16. She beat Maria Kirilenko in the next round after losing a 17-15 second set tiebreaker, the longest women's tiebreak in a Grand Slam match.

"I feel there has been some obstacles to get through this tournament, and to come through the way I have, I'm really pretty proud of myself," Stosur said.

The match had been pushed to the Grandstand court, the consequence of rainouts on Tuesday and Wednesday and moisture leaching issues on Armstrong Stadium.

That Kerber reached the semifinals is a result out of the blue. The German of Polish heritage had never been past the third round of a Grand Slam event and was the No. 92 ranked player entering the Open.

"The first few games were too fast for me," Kerber said. "I come out there and it was everything new for me, so many people and the lights . . . I try everything I can do. It was a great tournament for me.''