WASHINGTON – Down 5-1 in the second set, with Leylah Fernandez sitting comfortably on the brink of forcing a third, Alexandra Eala did what she has been doing at this tournament all week. She did not wait for the conditions to improve before she did.
She won six of the last seven games, took the tiebreak 7-1, and left the defending Mubadala DC Open champion with 42 unforced errors and no satisfying account of what had just happened. The score was 6-2, 7-6(1). The defending champion was out.
This is not the first time Eala has done this to someone who held a title somewhere 12 months ago. Four weeks earlier at Wimbledon, she knocked out Iga Swiatek – who was defending the grass-court title – to reach the third round at the All England Club. Thursday’s result in Washington was the second consecutive tournament in which Eala has beaten the defending champion. The first time was forgivable. The second is a pattern.
The Mubadala DC Open quarterfinal belongs to Eala, who will face either No. 2 seed Elina Svitolina or qualifier Polina Kudermetova. The 22-year-old Filipino, who won the Roland Garros junior title in 2022, has spent this week establishing a different kind of résumé: not a prospect adjusting to the main draw, but a player capable of taking the match away from whoever is across the net when the match is supposed to be going the other direction.
She did it against Zheng Qinwen in her previous round, coming back from a set and a break down to win – a result Zheng communicated her feelings about at the net with a handshake that fell considerably short of warm. She did it again against Fernandez, absorbing the second-set surge that the former champion clearly believed would carry her through, then taking the tiebreak without flinching.
“I know that she was playing a little better, and maybe my level dropped a little bit,” Eala said after the match, describing the sequence where Fernandez ran to 5-1. “Those are very tricky moments. I think patience was key there, just trying to work it out, and a strong mentality in terms of trying to find solutions.”
Finding solutions from unfavorable positions is the distinction between players who compile strong records against lower-seeded opponents and players who win the matches that matter. Fernandez, who has rarely been short on competitive nerve, ran into the limit of that principle. From 5-1 ahead in the second, the pressure was supposed to fall on Eala to prevent the third. Eala did not appear to register that logic.
Fernandez identified Toronto as her next checkpoint. “We’ll see in Toronto if it is a silver lining,” Yahoo Sports reported her telling reporters – as frank an admission as professional tennis typically allows about the gap between where a player expected a week to end and where it actually did. She finished the match with 42 unforced errors, a generous tally on any surface, and considerably generous on hardcourt.
Elsewhere in the draw, Naomi Osaka advanced when Ashlyn Krueger retired mid-match with a right ankle injury. The result puts Osaka in the quarterfinal without fully resolving where her form sits heading into the summer’s final stretch. She arrived in Washington off her first Wimbledon quarterfinal, where she dismantled world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka – ending the Belarusian’s 21-match Grand Slam tiebreak winning streak – before the draw moved on without her. Anastasia Potapova added to Thursday’s results by defeating Venus Williams, whose presence in any draw continues to demand full preparation from opponents who know better than to treat her otherwise.
The backdrop to all of it is the US Open, which opens at Flushing Meadows on August 25. Sabalenka arrives as the defending women’s champion. Jannik Sinner, who retained the Wimbledon title last month by dismissing Alexander Zverev in straight sets, is the men’s favorite coming off a summer in which he has been the final player standing at the All England Club. Carlos Alcaraz, whose wrist injury cost him both the French Open and Wimbledon, is targeting an August 11 return at the Cincinnati Open – the hardcourt warm-up that now carries the weight of his entire US Open defense.
In that context, the results in Washington this week carry a particular significance. The North American hardcourt swing is where the summer’s shape announces itself – where players either confirm what their grass-court results suggested or begin rewriting them on a different surface. Eala, two rounds in and carrying wins over Zheng Qinwen and the defending champion, is among the clearer announcements the week has produced. The Philippines has not historically been where women’s tennis leaves its most notable marks; Eala has spent several seasons quietly reorganizing that reference point, and this week in Washington has given her a platform to do it in direct terms.
The quarterfinal will present a different problem from what came before. Svitolina or Kudermetova arrives with information about Eala’s tendencies, sufficient recovery time, and the specific pressure that forms when a run shifts from unexpected to anticipated. Whether Eala’s answer to that version of the challenge continues the trend this week has established is what the next match will determine.
The trend, as it stands, is this: when the match goes somewhere Eala is not supposed to survive, she finds a way through. Leylah Fernandez found that out from 5-1 up. Zheng Qinwen found it out with a set in hand. The quarterfinal will decide whether the lesson extends.
