Mike Celizic

The Wimbledon semifinals are set, and the odds are looking good for yet another all-Williams final. Unless you’re a member of the Williams family, that’s a recipe for boredom.

It’s nothing personal. Despite their occasional solipsistic excesses, Venus and Serena Williams are both pretty good people and really good role models for young women everywhere. They’re among the greatest women tennis players ever. They are Americans who win on grass and clay and hard courts in an era when it’s impossible to find any other American who can win on any surface.

I fully expect one of them to win Wimbledon, and it would be great to see either Serena win her eleventh grand slam or Venus win her eighth. I just don’t want the winner to beat her sister. I want her to beat somebody from some other country, someone we can root against on shallow nationalistic grounds.

That’s what great finals are all about. Cheering for Country A against Country B. Or for the upstart surprise finalist against the overwhelming favorite. Or for the best-looking player. Or for the baseliner over the serve-and-volley artist or vice versa.

The best opponents for American heroes are Russians if only because it brings back nostalgic memories of the Cold War. By luck, the sisters Williams each face a Russian in the semifinals: world No. 1 Dinara Safina for Venus and No. 4 Elena Dementieva for Serena.

Those will be matches worth watching because they’ll be filled with drama. Neither Safina nor Dementieva have broken through for a grand slam title. Both will be underdog crowd favorites against their powerful opponents, who have combined to win seven of the last nine Wimbledon singles titles.

Either Safina or Dementieva have to come through for us and win her semifinal. It doesn’t matter which one does it. It just matters that we don’t have another all-Williams final.

My problem is that when Serena and Venus square off, I can’t manufacture a rooting interest in the match, and having somebody to cheer for is everything in sports. I like them both, love watching them bash the ball around, am amazed at their speed and athleticism. I also have great respect for the fact that they both battled slumps and injuries that dropped them in the rankings, then returned to the top of their sport. At 29, an age when most women tennis players have long since burned out, Venus may be playing her best tennis ever. At 27, the same could be said of Serena.

But which one do you cheer for? They’re both bright, decent, charitable and American. Both have been annoying from time to time, but by the standards of professional sports, they’re among the best at representing themselves and their country. Neither has ever been involved in anything even remotely scandalous.

They also play similar styles — the “Williams Way,” their father, Richard Williams calls it. And they’ve played each other so many times, it’s not like there’s any novelty in yet another meeting. We’ve seen this show before.

When Chris Evert played all those grand slam finals against Martina Navratilova, there was a distinct difference in style of play, personality, ethnicity and even sexual orientation — a smorgasbord of differences to help you make your cheering choice.

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We don’t get it here. They’re sisters and they like each other and they both wallop huge serves and hammer winners from the baseline. How do you cheer for one and not the other? And if you’re cheering for both, how can you enjoy the match.

Even Papa Williams doesn’t want to watch them play each other in the final. “I’ll go home because I can’t watch,” he told the Associated Press in England when asked about the prospect of another all-Williams final.

In his case, he doesn’t want to see one of his girls lose. I can’t even imagine the agony it must be to watch. On every point, there’s something for him to mourn. He probably hates seeing his daughters lose more than he loves watching them win. The Williams family can’t lose, and Richard can’t win.

So either Safina or Dementieva should do the poor guy a favor and get into the final against either Venus or Serena. If only for poor Richard’s sanity.

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