What to look out for on Day 11 of The Wimbledon Championships

After all the turbulence and upsets of the first week of The Championships, with seeds scattered in dizzying profusion, chaos has subsided, some order restored and here we are on ladies’ semi-finals day left with four gilt-edged contenders.

Any one of this exceptional quartet will make a worthy first-time Wimbledon champion. Which is, of course, very much as it should be.

In the first clash on Centre Court, Aryna Sabalenka (main picture) will seek the fairly outlandish feat of reaching a fourth consecutive Grand Slam final, something not witnessed in the women’s game for a decade since Serena Williams was ruling the roost.

But the world No.1 will have to get past Amanda Anisimova, the one-time wunderkind who took a break for the good of her mental health and has returned, at 23, to soar, reinvigorated, into her first Grand Slam semi-final for six years.

Then we’ll have five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek at last taking a fitting place in a Wimbledon semi-final, sounding buoyed like some mystical reborn ‘ball whisperer’, up against Belinda Bencic, a Tokyo 2020 Olympic champion wholly rejuvenated as a contented and ferociously determined mum.

Sabalenka’s progress over the Fortnight has been fascinating to behold, a rare old struggle with herself for a champion used to imposing her forceful will on her opponents.

That’s been hard these past 10 days. In each of her first four matches, she had to win seven games or a tie-break in at least one set, while in her fifth contest, the crafty wiles of Laura Siegemund looked at times as if they might drive her both to distraction and out of the tournament.

That she managed to keep her cool and survive to line up a clash with Anisimova, who has proved mightily awkward for her in the past, was testament to how the US Open champion is still learning to adapt and grow as a competitor.

Indeed, she feels the Siegemund match was one she might have lost a few weeks ago when, by her own admission, emotions overwhelmed her during the Roland-Garros final and she delivered an error-strewn performance in defeat to Coco Gauff.

“I’m just a human being who’s still learning in life. I think we all have those days when we lose control,” she reflected in typical open-book fashion, having also offered an apology to her US conqueror for suggesting Gauff’s victory was more down to her mistakes than the American’s excellence.

“In some moments, I just keep reminding myself, ‘Come on, it’s the quarter-final of Wimbledon, you cannot give up, you cannot let the emotions just take over you and lose another match. I was just reminding myself it’s my dream, so I have to keep fighting.”

And now the fight’s really on again. Anisimova boasts a 5-3 head-to-head lead against her, even though Sabalenka prevailed in their last duel at Roland-Garros.

But grass suits Anisimova’s game, and for Sabalenka there will be no head-scratching about puzzling forehand slices and dinky half-court approaches in this one. “We’re big hitters, and big hitters like to go at it against each other,” as the American beamingly puts it. It’ll be punch for punch.

Swiatek and Bencic both sounded slightly incredulous to have ploughed through their ‘grass ceiling’ to earn maiden Wimbledon semi-final spots, even though their long-time pedigree actually made it a tale of the not-too-unexpected.

That Bencic has only reached one semi-final in 34 previous Grand Slam appearances (six years ago at the US Open) seems extraordinary in a career of nine titles, including Olympic gold in Tokyo.

She was ranked world No.489 at the start of the year after her maternity break, but has returned with serenity, poise, a happy globetrotting baby Bella and an attitude that, well, tennis is important but perhaps not as all-consuming as she thought.

Maybe Swiatek, already a great no matter what happens in the next few days, has found the key to Wimbledon, too. Enjoy the pasta and strawberries, don’t fret about the British air conditioning and enjoy “the ball now talking to me on the grass”.

Apparently, it’s whispering all the right sweet nothings to her.

The two ladies’ semi-finals won’t be our only treats, with the prospect that we could be cheering the first home winner of The Championships 2025 when the evergreen Joe Salisbury, who used to go to school here in Wimbledon, plays in the mixed doubles final on Centre Court alongside Brazilian Luisa Stefani against Dutchman Sem Verbeek and Czech Katerina Siniakova.

Salisbury lost the mixed doubles final here in 2021 alongside Harriet Dart, but this is his chance to at last land that elusive first Wimbledon crown to go with his six other Grand Slams collected over the years. We wish him well.