Wimbledon 2012: Serena Williams taken all the way by Jie Zheng before seeing out thriller So it was remarkable that this match began to take on the dynamic of a big-serving contest, as if it were being played between Boris Becker and Goran Ivanisevic. Lose your serve once, and that was probably the set gone for good. "I just wasn't making my returns," said Williams, who enjoyed the support of actor Dustin Hoffman in her player's box. I hit so many errors. So my serve definitely helped me out today, and it was good to know that I could rely on that. As the third set went into overtime, Zheng had a couple of moments when she stood within two points of victory, just as Julien Benneteau had against Roger Federer on Friday night. But that was as close as she came, as Williams managed to find her focus whenever the situation grew desperate. That was the big difference between this win and her first-round exit at the hands of France's Virginie Razzano in Paris last month - another match where her service return turned dysfunctional. "I was definitely way more calm today than I was in my last long match and the loss," she said afterwards. "I thought, "Serena, just relax and be calm." I never felt like I was going to lose this match. It may have helped Williams that the Centre Court crowd gave her plenty of encouragement yesterday, whereas the Parisians had been entirely against her. The whole mood of this match summed up the difference between Roland Garros - with its fanaticism and its unhinged passion - and the serene, patrician acres of Wimbledon. Not that Williams was at all blasé about the outcome. As she started to turn the screw on Zheng in the final moments, we saw her jackknife over as if stricken by stomach cramps - though in fact this was an extreme version of the doubled-up fist-pump popularised by Maria Sharapova among others. When she finally closed it out, floating a volley into the open court on her third match point, she leapt high into the air, giving the photographers a dramatic view of her natty purple undershorts. Next up will be Yaroslava Shvedova, the Kazakh who has had a magnificent month after reaching the quarter-finals of the French Open. And Williams had better make sure she has calibrated her service return by then, because Shvedova is one of the heavier hitters on the women's tour. Yesterday Shvedova caught everyone's attention by whitewashing Sara Errani by 24 points to zero in the first set of their match. It was a remarkable statistical achievement that Williams took a moment or two to compute. "Sascha [Bajin, the rapper] was like, "She got a golden set." I was like, What does that mean? I immediately thought, "She won all four in a row and the Olympics?" That's the only golden thing I know of. "She's such a solid player," Williams added. So I look forward to it. Hopefully I'll be able to win a point in the set. That will be my first goal, and then I'll go from there. So the dream final of Williams v Sharapova is still a possibility. Perhaps this match will be the narrow escape that kicks Williams's whole game - and not just her serve - into the grass-court groove she used to find without thinking.