World No. 1 Serena Williams is not only an overwhelming favourite with fans and pundits to win this year’s Wimbledon Championships, she is also in the hunt for a calendar Grand Slam. However, she first has to get past her second round opponent Timea Babos, whom she has never met previously on the professional tour.

It was a turbulent Monday afternoon for Serena Williams, who had to withstand the imposing gameplay from Russian qualifier Margarita Gasparyan to secure her place in the second round of the tournament. The Russian held a 3-1 lead in the first set and a 4-1 lead in the second but was unable to deny Williams a 6-4, 6-4 victory in the end.

“She played really well,” Williams said. “She also had a few matches under her belt from the qualifying, so she was ready for the grass. She got off to a really fast start. She was playing really well today. “I would be lying if I said I wanted a hard match, of course, but I think it’s good for me. At the end of the day, it’s definitely good for me. But no one really wants to be in any sort of difficult match!”

“She was just hitting a lot of winners,” she said. “When the first set was over, she actually hit more winners than I did. Usually I’m really quick and I get to those shots, but they were just so cleanly hit that I wasn’t able to get to them as fast as I wanted to. There was nothing I could do about them.”

Williams will next come up against Timea Babos, who reached the second round following a straight sets win against Cetkovska. She won the match 7-6, 6-3 in one hour and 19 minutes.

This marks the first time that Williams and Babos will cross paths in the professional tour and should be a match that heavily favours the American. She has proven to be a dominant force in 2015 and it is unlikely that Babos will be the one to usurp Williams.