Queen on the green defies form and weather to court true greatness

Venus Williams's Wimbledon victory proved to me that she is the best grass-court player of her generation and means that she can now be counted among the Wimbledon greats. Of this current crop of players, no one comes close to matching Venus's four Wimbledon titles, a tally previously reached by only Billie Jean King, Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova.

Most players use their most recent results to gauge where their game is at and to find their confidence but somehow both the Williams sisters are able to disregard how they played two days ago and find the belief from inside themselves. They can turn that switch on so quickly because they have a deep-seated belief that transcends form. I have never seen anything like it.

These two players have broken all the rules from day one. They did not play junior tournaments after the age of 10, so that the first tournaments they played were WTA Tour events, in which they did well right away.

People play juniors and lower-league tour events because they need time to learn how to be match tough; but not them. They don't play the kind of warm-up events that everyone else does and the way they can come into form in the middle of grand-slam tournaments, like Venus has done here and Serena did in Australia at the start of this year, makes them unique in professional tennis.

To me it seemed almost like Venus had two different tournaments. Early on she really wasn't finding any consistency and she was struggling to find a rhythm but she fought through because of the champion that she is. Her fourth-round victory over the No2 seed, Maria Sharapova, was the turning point in her Championships. Once she got that form back it gave her a momentum which the American then carried all the way to the title.

I have to blow my own trumpet here and remind everyone that I gave Williams an outside chance of winning in the Guardian column I wrote before the tournament began. I was not surprised to see her win, especially after her 2005 victory.

Each of the four times Venus has won Wimbledon it has been completely different. In 2000 and 2001 she was dominating the game and in those days she did not suffer many funky, early-round defeats. By the 2005 Championships, however, everyone was asking whether she would ever win a grand-slam title again, which is why that victory still stands as the most impressive of the four.

Though Rafael Nadal played very well in that brilliant men's final, I also expected to see Roger Federer equalling Bjorn Borg's five consecutive Wimbledon titles yesterday and, unless the world No1 has one really bad day or someone has a major breakthrough in the next 12 months, I see him making it six this time next year.

Beyond that I think he will match Pete Sampras's seven Wimbledon titles and I am sure that he will break Pete's record of 14 grand-slam championships. He is only 25, and he has time to break all of those records and more.

Roger has everything in his game and it seems like he is only getting better and distancing himself further from the pack, particularly on grass.

The rain earlier in the Championships has made it a long, gruelling tournament for everybody. It is physically exhausting to sit around all day but know that you might have to be ready to go and play in 20 minutes. Then when players did get on court, there were so many windy days that conditions were often very tough.

However, in five or 10 years' time nobody will remember any of that. They won't recall that it was windy, or that it rained a lot, or that the scheduling was sometimes difficult. They probably won't even remember who the runners-up were and they will certainly have no recollection that the women's champion almost lost in the third round to Japan's Akiko Morigami or that the men's champion had six days off in the middle of the tournament.

All it will say on the honour roll is that Venus Williams and Roger Federer were the 2007 Wimbledon champions - that is all that counts.