They’ll Tea It Up at All England

The women at the All England Club on Monday played eight fourth-round matches, involving 14 of the world’s top 20 players, five Grand Slam champions and three Wimbledon champions. But all most of them wanted to discuss when play ended was today’s match between No. 4 Jennifer Capriati and No. 5 Serena Williams.

It’s a quarterfinal, but it is expected to be played with the intensity of a final. Officials have placed it as the first match of the day on Center Court.

Anticipated since the draw was released two weeks ago, the match became a reality when Williams beat Magdalena Maleeva, 6-2, 6-1, in 49 minutes and Capriati beat Sandrine Testud, 6-1, 6-2, in 58 minutes.

No one would have been the least bit disappointed if Williams and Capriati had been drawn in different brackets and had advanced to the final. Williams was the 1999 U.S. Open champion; Capriati has won the Australian and French Opens this year. Capriati is attempting to become the first player to win all four major tournaments in the same year since Steffi Graf in 1988.

Capriati and Williams also met in May in the quarterfinals of the French Open, Capriati winning, 6-2, 5-7, 6-2. Her career record against Williams is 3-1, 2-0 this year.

“I think she’s probably going to be pretty eager, especially against me since I just beat her twice,” Capriati said. “She probably wants to get revenge.”

Williams confirmed that, saying, “I’ve really been looking forward to this match since the draw came out. I want it real bad.”

In today’s other quarterfinal matches, No. 2 Venus Williams will meet No. 9 Natalie Tauziat; No. 3 Lindsay Davenport will meet No. 7 Kim Clijsters; and No. 19 Conchita Martinez will meet No. 8 Justine Henin.

The featured match among the women Monday was Davenport’s 7-5, 6-4 victory over No. 14 Jelena Dokic in a rematch of last year’s semifinals, which Davenport also won.

When they were drawn to meet in the first round of the Australian Open in January, Dokic’s father, Damir, charged that officials had fixed the draw against his daughter.

After Davenport won in three sets, Dokic, at her father’s insistence, announced that she would represent her native Yugoslavia in the future instead of Australia and had moved from Sydney to Florida. It later was revealed that she had applied for a Yugoslav passport five weeks before the controversy in Australia.

Damir, who recently returned from a six-month suspension from tournaments because of an incident at the U.S. Open, was quiet Monday, nervously sucking on a pipe but never flaunting the no-smoking rules by lighting it.

The reason the Dokics didn’t want to play Davenport was clear. The 1999 Wimbledon champion and 2000 runner-up was clearly too powerful.

“I had a pretty tough draw, to play Lindsay in the fourth round,” Dokic said. “I think if I would have played a lot of the other fourth rounds, I would probably have had more of a chance. That’s just unlucky.”

In the other matches, Venus Williams beat Nadia Petrova, 6-2, 6-0, in 51 minutes; Clijsters beat Megan Shaughnessy, 7-6 (2), 7-6 (5); Henin beat Anke Huber, 4-6, 6-2, 6-2, 6-2; Martinez beat Lina Krasnoroutskaya, 6-3, 6-4; and Tauziat beat Tamarine Tanasugarn, 6-3, 6-2.

Asked what she will tell her sister about playing Capriati, Venus Williams said: “Play your game. That’s all she has to do really. If she goes out there and plays, it’s going to be rough for anyone.”

Serena said she failed to do that at the French Open.

“I think it was someone impostoring me,” she said.