Hi there, this is Martina Navratelova and you're listening to the tennis podcast.

Well hello and welcome to the tennis podcast on a quite extraordinary day of tennis

for semi-finals in one day but the only real talking point despite the fact that we have the 42nd

instalments of the Jacovic Federal rivalry to look forward to the big talking point,

Simon Briggs, is the fact that Serena Williams is not going to do the calendar year slam.

Yeah it's been a freaky Friday here at the USA when we didn't plan to have these four matches

all on the same day as it is, three of them were quite routine in terms of being very one-sided

and the one everyone will remember forever is the Serena match where she lost to Roberta Vinci.

So that's really up there with the San Press against George Bastel and those kind of absolute

massive banana skin shockers from the heydays of tennis and it's hard to imagine a bigger

upset that's ever been pulled off. I mean nobody thought that Vinci was stopped.

Her people thought that she might struggle in the final perhaps with the sense that this is

the last match but after she got back past Venus pretty comfortably and had played well

in the previous round, Kamala came out of a shock. Certainly did. You mentioned the all-time

shocks. We were going through them, some of them during our BBC Radio 5 live commentary and talking

about things like Lucas Russell beating Nadal going all the way back to Steffi Grafloos into

Lorry McNeil in the first round of Wimbledon many many years ago. Matches of that ilk,

I mean I can't think of another one on a scale such as this with this much at stake.

That was the big thing. Vinci played fabulously. But do you feel as though Serena Williams

brought her own demise? Is it doing against Becker as well? That's right, yeah. Second round of

Wimbledon after he was twice defending champion? Yeah so the difference is not in terms of it's not

as big a gap in terms of the rankings but it's just because the story was so huge and I suppose

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