Garbine Muguruza powered into her second Wimbledon semi-final in the last three years with an emphatic 6-3, 6-4 win over Russian seventh seed Svetlana Kuznetsova on Tuesday.
Since winning her maiden Grand Slam title at the French Open last year, Muguruza has struggled to return to the top and this is her first major semi-final since that Roland Garros triumph.
Muguruza will face Magdalena Rybarikova on Thursday for a place in Saturday’s final.
“I played good. I’m trying not to think a lot, just go for it and play my game. I’m happy it worked out,” Muguruza said.
“It seems far away since I last made the final here. I’m a completely different player.
“It means a lot to make the semi-finals again, my breakthrough was here.”
Beaten in the 2015 Wimbledon final by Serena Williams, Muguruza has a golden opportunity to lift the Venus Rosewater Dish for the first time while the 23-time major winner is sidelined preparing for the birth of her first child.
The 23-year-old, coached by compatriot and former Wimbledon winner Conchita Martinez, broke Kuznetsova in the fourth game of the first set, an advantage she never looked like relinquishing.
Kuznetsova, a former French and US Open champion, was in her first Wimbledon quarter-final for 10 years, but the 32-year-old had no answer to Muguruza’s searing ground-strokes.
Claiming another break in the fifth game of the second set, Muguruza pressed home her advantage to wrap up the win in 75 minutes on Court One.
Rybarikova continues to script her Wimbledon tale
The eighty-seventh ranked Slovakian became the lowest ranked woman to reach the Wimbledon semi-finals for nine years as she shocked the 24th seed Coco Vandeweghe 6-3, 6-3 on Tuesday.
Rybarikova is the lowest ranked woman to make the semi-finals of any Grand Slam since Angelique Kerber, then the world No 92, at the 2011 US Open.
The 28-year-old, who had lost in the first round in eight of her previous nine visits to Wimbledon, is also the first Slovakian woman to make the last four at the All England Club.
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