One hundred and twenty-eight women arrived in Paris in search of a major title.  Two remain.  One of them, Serena Williams, was expected to be in the championship match all along.  Her opponent, Lucie Safarova, has surprised everybody with her run to the final.  On Saturday, they will take to the court against each other in a battle to determine who will hoist the trophy and be crowned the 2015 Roland Garros Women's Champion.

The quality and the outcome of this match rests on two key factors:  the successful utilization of the respective weapons of each of the combatants and how they psychologically cope with the magnitude of the occasion.  The first factor hinges primarily on Williams.  As the player who boasts the more powerful game, the American is in an advantageous position to control more of what is happening out on the court.  Her game is built around her serve, and she is going to want it to be clicking on Saturday.  Not only is that likely to garner her multiple free or quick points, but it will open her up to be more aggressive on the return.  Williams must also work on showing more patience and wait for the right moment to attack.  Unforced errors have plagued her this tournament, but there is no need to pull the trigger early when her superior penetrating groundstrokes are bound to give her plenty of looks at short balls to attack.

Naturally, Safarova does not want to regularly invite the top seed to go on the offensive.  In order to avoid that scenario, she must make Williams press, and the Czech arguably has the talent and tools to accomplish that.  She has more than a respectable amount of firepower in her own game, greater variety in her bag of tricks, and is more skilled at the net.  But if she hopes to employ these strengths, she has to be brave enough to play the brand of tennis that has gotten her to this point.  That means putting in a high percentage of quality first serves, not only to put herself in a favorable position but also to eliminate giving Williams too many looks at her second serve.  In addition to that, she needs to continue to go after her lefty forehand, which she has hit both cross-court and inside-out to devastating effect these past two weeks.  Furthermore, it is imperative that Safarova force herself to stay up on the baseline and step in to take the initiative when opportunities arise.  She has the unenviable task of having to red-line her game, but doing so could be the key to earning a victory.

Having the requisite tools for success is just one part of the key to achieving victory, however.  Players must also be mentally prepared to seize the moment when it matters most, and it is in this area where there are so many question marks surrounding Safarova.  After all, Williams is a stalwart at this juncture of a major.  She has far more experience than the Czech at contesting matches of this significance and has won the majority of them.  Additionally, she comes in having defeated Safarova in all eight of their previous meetings, only three of which have gone the distance.  If all that were not enough, the American has the comfort of knowing that, as the woman with the bigger game, she is in greater control of her destiny out there.  Yes, she is human.  Yes, she could crack under the pressure.  But as she has proven throughout this tournament and so often throughout her career, she is a fighter.  Whether she plays well or plays poorly, few would bet against her finding a way to cross the finish line in this championship match.

Safarova is going to be equally as keen as Williams to secure the victory, although it is safe to say that she is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the American when it comes to this type of situation.  On Saturday, she will be tasked with doing two things she has never done before.  The first is to contest and hopefully win a Grand Slam singles final, and the second is to defeat Williams.  Both are difficult on their own, nearly impossibly for most players when combined, and there is no telling how Safarova will rise to these challenges.  Historically, the Czech has always been a talented player who lacked the belief to make the transition from pretender to contender.  But she has put a lot of those demons behind her in recent months, and she has pulled off some impressive results this tournament, including the dismissal of Maria Sharapova and Ana Ivanovic.  She has admirably bounced back from the disappointment of blown chances here in Paris, and it is worth noting that for the majority of her semifinal, she looked like a player who believed she belonged there.  If it is that confident Safarova, and not the deer in headlights, who shows up in the final with guns blazing, fans could be in for one entertaining and interesting battle.

In the end, the beauty of live sports is that nothing is a given.  Nobody knows exactly how this tournament will conclude.  After two weeks of shocking results, the odds definitely favor Serena Williams, the top seed, ultimately restoring order in the end by claiming her 20th major singles crown.  Then again, it could just as appropriately be Lucie Safarova who caps off the festivities in Paris with yet another stunning upset.  Either way, hopefully this mach turns into a classic worthy of a Roland Garros final.