As the four players made their way down the steps at Queen’s Club, there was no doubt that the raucous roar from the 9,000-plus crowd was meant just for Williams.<\/p>\n
But there was no big reaction from the former world number one, who gave a brief wave before starting her warm-up and locking in for the task ahead.<\/p>\n
Williams said on Sunday that winning was “not important” on her return, but it was inevitable that the competitive spirit would kick in for the great champion.<\/p>\n
With every point that the pair won, Williams raised a clenched fist before marching back to Mboko to talk tactics, while she let out a huge celebratory roar when the teenager reacted quickly to slam down a volley at the net.<\/p>\n
The seven-time Wimbledon singles champion’s powerful groundstrokes looked as good as ever, while her serve still had the same sting, with one coming in at 120mph to cause a stir among the crowd.<\/p>\n
Williams, however, was modest about her performance. When asked for a report card, she said: “What do you think? A C-minus?”<\/p>\n
Her overhead shots looked a tad rusty, while she was slightly off the pace with her movement at times and Mboko did a sublime job covering from the baseline.<\/p>\n
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Mboko said. “I thought she was moving great.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the four players made their way down the steps at Queen’s Club, there was no doubt that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-630888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}