In his last All England Club campaign, Jonas Bjorkman and partner Kevin Ullyett sent top seeds Bob and Mike Bryan crashing out of Wimbledon to reach the men's doubles final on Thursday.
Seeded eighth, Bjorkman of Sweden and Zimbabwe's Ullyett ended the American brothers' hopes of a fourth consecutive Wimbledon doubles final, winning 7-6, 5-7, 7-6, 7-6.
The Bryans, who won at Wimbledon in 2006 and were runners-up in 2007 and 2005, fought back from one set down but were later undone by their opponents' tidy serve-and-volley play.
Strong service games took the third and fourth sets to tiebreaks and following two rain interruptions the players resumed with the Bryan brothers serving to stay in the match.
They saved the first two match points but a Bjorkman smash set up a third and this time he and Ullyett made sure they closed it.
Bjorkman, who has won nine Grand Slam doubles titles and also held a number one doubles ranking, announced his decision to retire at the end of the year last month.
The popular Swede won three Wimbledon doubles trophies in a row from 2002 to 2004 and also celebrated three Swedish Davis Cup wins.
Bjorkman and Ullyett will now play either ninth seeds Lukas Dlouhy of Czech Republic and India's Leander Paes or second seeds Daniel Nestor of Canada and Nenad Zimonjic of Serbia in this weekend's final. Paes and Dlouhy fought back magnificently after narrowly losing the first set but had to leave the tantalizingly-posed semi-final unfinished at 7-6 (7-4), 4-6, 6-1, 3-3 because of bad light.
