Serena wins with her mind on other things

Serena Williams likes making an impression. When it takes little more than an hour to reach the third round of Wimbledon, with an eye-catching long blonde hairpiece and head glistening with ornaments, and with the world heavyweight boxing champion in your coterie, most 20-year-olds would have reckoned they had made one.

"Actually I wasn't pleased at all," said Williams after a 6-3, 6-3 victory over Francesca Schiavone, a world top-50 Italian. "I wasn't pleased with my game today. Maybe my mind was in too many places. I kept making a lot of errors. I didn't move up to the net enough."

Having put that line of questioning abruptly in its place, Williams did the same to Lennox Lewis. "I don't know about him being a family friend," she said, and then briefly thought about it. "Maybe, a fan. A family fan, yes," she added.

It was true that she had not been at her best. Schiavone, who likes fast cars but did not fancy coping with too many fast returns, decided to live or die at the net. This meant that, although she steadily fell behind, she could dictate some of the rallies.

As a result there were times when the younger Williams was made to shift from side to side like a puppet, and it revealed her as being not only the game's hardest hitter but one of its fastest athletes.

Despite the crowd supporting the underdog, a twisting little wind which made serving less easy than it appeared and a first-service percentage that fell below 60%, she remains one of the two most likely winners of the title along with her sister Venus.

On the subject of accessories she explained how she missed her gold shoes; Wimbledon regulations forbade them, she said. And after having trouble with a hair ornament - Venus had lost an earring the day before - she would not dream of cutting them out. "Accessorise, accessorise, accessorise, you can never have too many accessories," she cackled and left with her grumbles forgotten.

It moved the second seed to within three matches of an expected semi-final with Jennifer Capriati, the Australian Open champion. Capriati, meanwhile, required a quarter of an hour less to overcome Marta Marrero, a 19-year-old from Las Palmas who plays volleyball but does not volley enough for grass.

The score was 6-2, 6-1 and Capriati was satisfied with that. She served more steadily than Williams had done and maintained a satisfyingly consistent aggression throughout, though the opposition from the world No72 was less forceful.

But Capriati was not so happy about the surface. "It's better not to let the ball bounce too many times on grass, because you never know with the bad bounces," she said, a surprising comment on the finest courts of their kind in the world.

"And you know you have to be thinking to play a certain way out there," she added. "The keys are serving and returns, so you obviously have to work on that. But you just can't get too frustrated on the grass." She sounded like a player yet to win a title on the stuff.

Capriati was also critical of Wimbledon's prize money. Would it be positive if it were equal? "Oh, absolutely that would be great," she said. I think the women would appreciate it and it would show that the organisers and directors really appreciate our game.

"But it's been like that for so long and," she added, referring to the prize fund equality at the US Open, "maybe things are a little bit different over there."

Then she sensed things were getting negative. "I mean there are so many arguments behind it," she said, changing direction. "It's not something I really want to get into at the moment."

She was invited to think about Serena Williams but she was not keen to contemplate that for too long either. "Well, first I have to get there," she said, preferring to consider her third-round meeting with the 19-year-old US Open quarter-finalist Daja Bedanova.

But, she was asked, assuming? There was no way she was falling for assumptions. "Assuming, I mean I'd rather not talk about it until it gets close," she said tartly.

On a day which had done for Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras it was unwise to get ahead of herself.