It’s easy to love Elena Dementieva. You have to appreciate someone who does so well with a wounded serve. Her arm doesn’t extend all the way up and the ball barely clears the net even when the serve is good. We’ve been compiling the member list of the fight club here lately and she’s a bona fide fighter. It’s often an adventure but she’s seldom out of a match.

Dementieva compensates for her poor serve with very good returns and plays from the baseline hitting missiles for ground strokes. Ana Ivanovic, her opponent in the semifinals here at Indian Wells, is a big server and likes to attack the net. You don’t know how happy it makes me to be able to write that about a young player on the WTA tour. Ivanovic, a Serbian, is 18 years old.

This is typical Dementieva. She had a double fault in every game but one in the first set and she lost her serve in that game.

Dementieva was down 4-1 in the first set when I was thinking that it was time for her to make a move. She started with a backhand winner to get a break point. Ivanovic recovered with two winners of her own then ran into the net to pick up a Dementieva volley and tried to hit a passing shot. Dementieva quickly read it and smacked a swinging volley cross court. She broke Ivanovic and though she went onto to lose the set, 6-2, Dementieva was starting to take over in her own peculiar up and down way.

This is typical Dementieva. She had a double fault in every game but one in the first set and she lost her serve in that game. She also lost the first game in the second set, on a double fault of course.

You can tell who’s controlling the ground game by looking at who redirects the ball. The next game was already on its fourth deuce when Ivanovic redirected a forehand down the line after an exchange of cross court shots. It gave her a game point and if she’d won the game, she would have been in command with a 2-0 lead. But Dementieva hit a hard backhand down the line and put away Ivanovic’s weak response.

From then on, Dementieva started to pound the ball and Ivanovic’s 1st serve percentage went underground. A Serbian reporter sitting next to me was mumbling to himself. This being Dementieva, though, it wasn’t over yet. Serving for the set at 5-3, Dementieva hit two very hard shots but Ivanovic got them both back. Dementieva then hit a drop volley but Ivanovic got to that too and passed her. After two consecutive double faults, they were back on serve.

But it was Dementieva who was redirecting balls now and Ivanovic was going for too much. She’s young, she’ll learn. Dementieva broke Ivanovic to win the second set and won the third set going away to get into the finals with a 2-6, 6-4, 6-2 win.

For three days I was accidentally sitting in the players’ side of the cafeteria instead of the media area. Either players were too nice to tell me or I was too insignificant to worry about. Andy Roddick’s match was on television one of the days and it was kind of fun watching Roddick’s fellow players point out that he was so far behind the baseline that he was off camera. Anyway, the players call Ivan Ljubicic “Luby” and I’m sorry for the false advertising but Luby’s match was anything but an adventure.

Unfortunately for Luby, the match took place in the desert sun – after the match he said it was not good conditions for his serve – and Federer played what he said was his best game of the year. Against Richard Gasquet, it was hard to gauge Federer’s readiness because Gasquet has struggled this year, but Ljubicic is 20-2 so far and he managed to get exactly one break point in what was a routine, 6-2, 6-3, win for Federer.

You have to marvel at Federer’s attitude. Peter Bodo asked him what impact the final in Dubai had on him. Federer lost to Rafael Nadal for the third time in four matches at the Dubai Duty Free tournament two weeks ago. Of course, Bodo is asking him because a Federer-Nadal final is looking more like a reality.

I felt bad for him after the Dubai loss. Here he was cruising along with seven slam wins in three years and here was Nadal, a legitimate threat to his kingdom. But Federer said, “I was happy with the way I played,” and expressed surprise that people were so interested in the match. “For me,” he said, “it was gone the next day.”

I don’t know that I believe that but I hope Nadal’s sprained ankle is sufficiently healed so we can hear what Federer has to say after his next match with Nadal.