MARIA REACHES SEMI-FINALS

Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova overcame an illness and injury scare to secure her place in tomorrow's semi-finals of the DFS Classic in Birmingham. The 18-year-old Russian battled a cold as well as a defiant opponent to reach her seventh semi-final of the year and gain more valuable grass-court practice ahead of Wimbledon.

Maria gained a 7-5 2-6 6-1 victory over the unseeded Eleni Daniilidou in a two-hour quarter-final and will play 17-year-old Tatiana Golovin - last year's beaten finalist - for a place in Sunday's final. But today's match was one she will quickly want to forget. She woke up this morning feeling unwell with a sore throat and called for a medical time-out early in the second set after complaining of muscle soreness. "I had a cold this morning and on top of that the grass court pushes your body," she explained. "My body got a little bit sore as the match went on. It was good to get some hot cream on it. "But it's just part of tennis. Every day you have things wrong with you. You are not going to be pefect all the time. "I'm going to have a whole week off before Wimbledon so there will be plenty of time to recover."
Athough she appeared to make a full recovery from her injury, Maria lost four of the next five games on the resumption to drop a set for the second successive match. The match was then held up a second time as the world number two took a bathroom break and she re-discovered her best form on her return to rip through the deciding set in just 26 minutes.
"I guess, I just figured I had been playing bad in the first two sets and I couldn't get any worse," she said. "I might as well just pick it up somewhere and try to do the best I can. "I just fought really hard in the end and wanted to return every single ball."