We could see it in their resilient quarter-final performances and we could hear it in their defiant post-match declarations. The four players still in the hunt to lift the Venus Rosewater Dish as Wimbledon ladies’ champion are all imbued with a rare fighting spirit that makes today’s semi-finals so compelling. This is a Centre Court parade of the warriors.
One match has the whiff of Hollywood about it, with the Muhammad Ali-like Serena Williams pounding her way back to reclaim her old supremacy but finding in her way a rejuvenated battler Barbora Strycova, who has made a more protracted trek than anyone to reach her first Grand Slam semi-final at 33. This one feels almost like Rocky with rackets.
The other features Simona Halep, a former world No.1 and Grand Slam winner, slugging it out with Elina Svitolina, the WTA Finals champion trooper who’s eminently capable of the same double.
Recall that picture of Halep on a drip in a Melbourne hospital after fighting exhaustion and dehydration in last year’s epic Australian Open final loss to Caroline Wozniacki and you’ll remember just how deep she’ll dig.
Then listen to Svitolina talk of how she takes her cue from her Ukrainian heroes, those fighting Klitschko brothers, and how she’d like to be remembered - “Always fighting. Always there. Try to bring my best game each match. Always giving 100 per cent each point” - and you’ll know she won’t give an inch.
So, two magnificent contests and one towering figure. Game by game, round by round, Williams thinks she is shedding the ring rust after an injury-riddled season and regalvanising that old superhero aura. “I have always been an Avenger in my heart,” she says.
Yet she’s not back at her matchless best. Indeed, maybe to expect she ever could be again as a 37-year-old mother with new priorities would now be wholly unreasonable. Except that this is Serena; we’ve learned how the extraordinary has become almost workaday for her.
I have always been an Avenger in my heart
There were moments during her quarter-final against the dogged Alison Riske, as she seemed to be wrestling with her own game, that you could have sworn it was only her ability to turn the contest into a war of wills, to impose her ferocity on her opponent’s psyche, that saw her prevail.
Riske felt it too. Having broken Williams at the start of the deciding set, she suddenly sensed the renewed force, a fresh, growling intensity. “Serena,” Riske reflected, “has no mercy.”
Strycova knows that from three straight-set hammerings by the seven-time champion but she swears to no fear. That’s easy to believe of this irrepressible Czech with a big, bubbling personality.
She shouldn’t be construed a journeyman, what with her superb junior and brilliant doubles career, being an inspiration in five Fed Cup triumphs and the occasional giant-killer with her clever, net-attacking game and comfort on the grass.
Yet why now, in her 53rd Grand Slam and perhaps her final year, is she blooming here? Blooming good question, she laughs. “I don't know. I'm just enjoying myself. Always to play good here was my dream - and it’s happening. At 33. Incredible.” It really is.
How to call that first semi-final, though? Svitolina, the first Ukrainian woman to reach a Grand Slam semi-final, leads 4-3 over Halep but the Romanian won the latest, a splendid three-set arm wrestle in this year’s Doha semi-final which could be mirrored by today’s duel.
Just don’t remind Halep of her only semi-final here in 2014, though. She had a thigh injury, sprained her ankle during the match and had terrible luck with a crucial net cord while losing to Eugenie Bouchard.
“I'm a different person now. Everything’s changed,” she smiles. Like falling in love with Wimbledon’s grass, which is something she thought she’d never say.
Winner at last year’s Roland-Garros, she’s even learned that losing her only Grand Slam last month wasn’t the end of the world. “Nobody died,” she found. Instead, she’s come to Wimbledon “happy, relaxed and motivated” and crushed the hopes of both a former world No.1, Victoria Azarenka, and perhaps a future world No.1, Cori Gauff.
Yet Svitolina, the first seed she’s faced in the Fortnight, is in an equally “happy place”, according to her English coach Andy Bettles. Having overcome a knee injury and reached a Grand Slam semi-final for the first time in five attempts while being cheered on by her boyfriend, French tennis magician Gael Monfils, maybe her time for a major graduation really now has come at 24.
As she spends so much of her time in London, someone even wondered cheekily if we could consider her an honorary Brit? Not quite, laughed this proud daughter of Odessa. But what about Bettles, the former British junior champion? With Mr Murray’s Wimbledon comeback now consigned to history, may we still hear the odd cry of ‘C’mon Andy!’?