Serena Williams swats aside Sevastova to set up US Open final with Naomi Osaka

• Former world No1 makes her ninth final at Flushing Meadows
• Williams overcomes early break to win 6-3, 6-0
• Osaka beats Madison Keys to reach her first grand slam final

For a great champion, Serena Williams sometimes teeters on the edge of meltdown. However a 6-3, 6-0 blitz of the estimable Latvian Anastasija Sevastova here on Thursday night went a long way to re-establishing the aura that has already put the American one clear of Steffi Graf’s 22 grand-slam titles and one short of the all-time record set by Margaret Court.

When her confidence is fully restored – and that could happen against the star of this 50th US Open, 20-year-old Naomi Osaka, in the final on Saturday – two years of uncertainty in the women’s game will be over.

Since Williams won the Australian Open last year before leaving the tour to have a baby, there has been a different women’s champion at every major. If she wins her seventh title from nine finals here, all things are possible.

Osaka, the Japanese prodigy who spent much of her childhood in New York, booked her place in the final when she took last year’s runner-up, Madison Keys, to the cleaners. She won 6-2, 6-4 in the second semi-final, by which time the heat outside the closed roof of the Arthur Ashe Stadium had been quelled by a brief shower.

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