WIMBLEDON, June 26: After a marathon first set lasting longer than many of her matches, defending champion Venus Williams overcame another erratic performance and pulled away to beat Britain’s Anne Keothavong 7-5, 6-2 on Thursday and reach the third round of Wimbledon.For the second straight match, the four-time champion faced a modest British opponent in the opening contest on Centre Court and was tested to the limit in the first set. The pattern and result were almost identical from her 7-6 (5), 6-1 win over Naomi Cavaday on Tuesday.

The first set alone lasted 1 hour, 9 minutes as Williams struggled to take command against a determined 92nd-ranked player who came into the tournament with only one win at Wimbledon in seven attempts.

“I lost a little bit of focus (in the first set) but got it back thankfully,” the American said.

In men’s play, second-seeded Rafa Nadal came from behind to beat 19-year-old Latvian star Ernests Gulbis 5-7, 6-2, 7-6 (2), 6-3 on Court 1 as he continued his bid of becoming the first player since Bjorn Borg in 1980 to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year.

Williams jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead before lapsing into a flurry of errors that turned the set into a battle of attrition, with the fourth and fifth games taking more than a half an hour.

Keothavong held for 2-2 after going to seven deuces, and then Williams saved eight break points in a game that went to 10 deuces, closing it out with a 124 mph (200 kph) service winner.

They went back and forth on serve until Williams broke for the set in the 12th game, hitting a deep backhand return that forced a forehand mistake by Keothavong. Williams broke for 3-1 in the second set with another deep serve return and cruised the rest of the way to close it out in 1 hour, 44 minutes. There was one tense moment in the second set when, with the two players across the net from each other, Keothavong ripped a backhand that hit Williams full force in the neck area.

Nadal, a two-time Wimbledon runner-up who swept to his fourth straight French Open title without dropping a set, lost the first set against the talented Gulbis - a quarterfinalist at the French _ when he was broken in the 12th game.

But Nadal sailed through the next set, took the third in a tiebreaker and got the decisive break for 5-3 in the fourth.

After hitting a forehand winner on match point, Nadal let out a shout, dropped into a crouch and pumped his left arm four times _ an unusually ebullient celebration after a second-round match, but indicative of the danger that Gulbis had posed.

“I’m very happy,” Nadal said. “I knew I was going to have a very tough match against a very aggressive player. I feel I improved during the match.”

In other men’s play, two-time runner-up Andy Roddick was to face Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia.

In other women’s matches, 2004 champion Maria Sharapova was paired against fellow Russian Alla Kudryavtseva and No. 2-seeded Jelena Jankovic faced Spanish wild card Carla Suarez Navarro.

The women’s field lost one former champion, 1999 winner Lindsay Davenport, when she withdrew with a right knee injury before her second-round match against Argentina’s Gisela Dulko.

The 32-year-old Davenport had limped past Renata Voracova in three sets in her opening match on Tuesday and decided she wasn’t fit to play after practicing Thursday morning.—AP