The Last Word / Tigress Shahar proves she's here to stay

It was a classic battle. In the end, we saw a struggle between two exhausted tigresses, expending the last ounces of their energy on each other. Dinara Safina looked as if she was running on zero energy. At times, she resembled Swiss marathon runner Gabrielle Andersen-Scheiss, crossing the finish line as she totters like a drunk, moments before losing consciousness. At other times, she looked like a heavyweight boxer who has been pounded again and again and is punching back because of conditioning and habit, waiting for the referee to ring the final bell.

Safina's heart-lung stamina was fading fast; her legs had long since failed her; her serves, which are usually made so powerful by her legs, were more like those of late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. But her mind kept on working and provided her with the ability to keep on producing the best tennis she could, given her physical condition. Her upper torso, which is intimidating, kept on firing surprisingly powerful shots right until the last moment. She lost a heroic fight.

In the final stages of the game, Shahar Peer should have knocked Safina off her feet much earlier in the contest. She appeared to have more energy than her opponent, but the word "appeared" conceals a whole world. Peer was more tired than she appeared. She was finding it impossible to maintain a high level of concentration for very long and missed several key shots, but she had the wisdom and the personality to conceal her weaknesses - thereby expanding the physical and mental gulf between her and Safina.

Even though she was sometimes too eager to end a point, Peer managed to stick to her patient game plan throughout the third set and continued to wear her opponent down, making her run without stopping until the very last point. When she wiggled her rear end in Safina's last service game, preparing to rip apart the wounded prey standing at the other end of the court, she looked like a tigress in a nature movie filmed in the African savanna. Ten claws were extended from her fingers when she moved forward, ready to pounce. "Just you dare," she seemed to be telling Safina. "Just you dare attack me." Safina, in an advanced state of collapse, had no choice; she played shots and used every last drop of energy, in one of the most engrossing tennis matches we have seen in recent years.

Safina came into the game from a position of superiority - from the final of the French Open. Peer started Wimbledon from the lowest point of her professional career. Despite two straight-set victories in the previous rounds, a straight-set defeat to Safina would not have surprised anybody. But Peer, free of expectation for the first time in many months, wanted to blow off the steam she had accumulated over the past six months and put into action everything she had learned from this difficult period.

Yesterday's game was one of the most impressive - and certainly the most important - in her career. For more than three hours, she faced thousands of balls, each of them different in trajectory and strength, but all of them combined to make one pendulous collection: winner-loser-winner-loser. It is feasible that defeat to a limping Safina would have sent Peer spiraling even further down. We will never know. But her victory in the gladiatorial battle redefines her - more than ever - as a true winner. Not just for a specific match or tournament, in which she may reach her peak, but for her whole career.

The failings of the first half of the current season, Peer transformed Saturday into a vaccine against further collapse in the coming years. Yesterday, she used her racket to send out a clear message: Never write me off again. I am here to stay and I intend to stay at the top.

How right she is.