Lomb tennis

? Venus Williams was down, if only for a moment.

The top seed in the Bausch & Lomb Championships stormed back from a 5-3 deficit in the first set to beat unseeded Anne Kremer 7-5, 6-0 Saturday and reach the final of the $585,000 clay court event at Amelia Island Plantation.

Williams, who struggled with her serve before winning the last 10 games, will meet No. 2 Justine Henin for the title today. Henin was leading her semifinal 6-2, 4-1 when No. 3 Jelena Dokic retired because of a stomach virus.

“When you’re playing a top player, you have to step up and close it out,” Williams said. “She missed a few shots.”

Like Henin and Dokic, Kremer was playing her second match of the day because rain the past four days threw the tournament schedule out of whack.

Kremer defeated fifth-seeded Sandrine Testud 7-5, 6-1 in the quarterfinals earlier in the day, but didn’t have enough left to keep pace when Williams corrected the problem with her serve.

“I was playing pretty well, but unfortunately I couldn’t keep it up,” Kremer said. “She stepped it up, definitely. But me, I stepped it down.”

The fresher Williams was the only semifinalist who was able to get her quarterfinal match in as scheduled on Friday.

“She played a lot of matches in the last 24 hours. You have to give her credit for getting this far and not running out of gas,” Williams said.