Number one seed and reigning champion, Serena Williams overcame a quite spectacular hiccup in the second set of her quarter-final tie against Spain's Anabel Medina-Garrigues to book her place in the semi-finals of the Mutua Madrid Open this Friday.

Williams had looked to be cruising to a comfortable victory against the Spaniard, who was receiving the support of her local fans in the Caja Magica in Madrid.

However, after winning the first set 6-3, Williams' game fell to pieces in the second set which Medina-Garrigues won to love. For a while it looked as if Williams would struggle to recover from that setback and the third set was a tense and nervous affair with both players swapping errors before Williams managed to win it 7-5 to seal a 6-3, 0-6, 7-5 win in just under two and a quarter hours.

Speaking after her match, Williams was at a loss to explain what had happened to her game.

"I wasn't really there. I wasn't really in it. My feet weren' t moving. I don't know what happened," she said about her disastrous second set, which she thought had helped give her rival extra confidence.

Williams explained she had been forced to focus in order to recover her intensity between the second and the decisive third set, "I started doing high knees and just stretching and doing anything to try to get my intensity back up where it needed to be, " she said, adding that it was important for her to cut out unforced errors and that to do that she would not go for so many winners.

"I start tomorrow at 0-0, so the important thing is to let it go and play a new match tomorrow (on Saturday), " she said.

Williams will play number 7 seed, Sara Errani for a place in the final after her 6-4, 6-3 win over Ekaterina Makarova.

Maria Sharapova also made it through to the semi-finals and although the number 2 seed had to work harder than expected against Kaia Kanepi, she never looked as if she was in any danger of losing and defeated her rivals 6-2, 6-4 in just over 82 minutes.

Sharapova had never made it into the last four in Madrid before and she will face sixteenth seed Ana Ivanovic, who caused a minor upset with a 6-3, 6-1 victory over number six seed, Angelique Kerber is less than an hour.

"I was just happy to get past the quarterfinals. Feel like I' ve been stuck in this tournament So it's nice to be in that stage. I felt like I was facing a really good clay court player today. A lot of her success has come on clay," commented Sharapova afterwards. Endi

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