Venus Williams won her biggest title outside of Wimbledon for seven years when she captprcd the WTA Tour's year-end event for the first time here on Sunday.

Williams' 6-7, 6-0, 6-2 win over Vera Zvonareva, the week's surprise packet, in the final of the Sony Ericsson championships, proved that she is still a major force on surfaces other than grass.

"It was a hard fought match right down to the end," reckoned Williams, though that hardly looked the case. "I am so excited. I wanted it so bad."

Asked how she recovered from her first set setback, when she had a long lead in the tie-break only to lose it and then lose the set on an unlucky net cord, Williams said: "That's tennis.

"Sometimes it goes your way and then all of a sudden in comes crashing down.

"It's been a pretty good year for me. Next year I hope I can stay healthy and I can go higher," added Venus, who will finish the year as world number six. Zvonareva will be seven, her highest ever.

Williams began sluggishly, perhaps suffering lingering effects from the tough match in which she beat world number one Jelena Jankovic the previous day.

She lacked penetration off the ground, and the more she sought to generate pace, the noisier she became with her gasp-grunts.

Zvonareva applied the majority of her attacks to the Venus backhand wing, but switched the ball around well too, looking the fresher and livelier player.

The lesser known player was also helped by an early double fault from the Wimbledon champion - a more frequent problem this week than she would have liked - which contributed to the loss of her first service game.

Zvonareva capitalised to reach 3-0 after a long struggled in the third game, and then held the advantage more comfortably to 5-3.

It was then that she showed, for the first time in five matches of the most i repressive week of her career, an inhibition about winning. She failed to convert four set points on her serve, one of them an error from a very makable volley, dropped that game and was taken to a tic-break.

She encountered a quite different Williams, who found the depth and the angles better and made better tactical choices, getting to the net twice successfully to help break Zvonareva's serve for 2-0.