Alexandra Eala, the first player from the Philippines to appear in the Internazionali BNL d’Italia in the Open Era, overcame a slow start against No. 31 seed Xinyu Wang of China to advance to the third round in Rome on Friday.<\/p>\n
Wang takes early lead before Eala finds her rhythm<\/p>\n
Wang, who won the pair\u2019s only previous meeting in the semifinals in Auckland earlier this year, broke Eala\u2019s serve twice to take a 3-0 lead in the opening set. But Eala soon settled into the match and began dictating play, winning six of the next seven games to claim the set 6-4.<\/p>\n
Eala wins final four games to seal straight-set victory<\/p>\n
The second set began with both players exchanging breaks before Wang saved two break points to hold for a 3-2 lead. From there, Eala won four consecutive games to complete a 6-4, 6-3 victory in 1 hour, 26 minutes. The win leveled their head-to-head record on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz at 1-1.<\/p>\n
First WTA 1000 third-round appearance on clay<\/p>\n
Eala, who reached the semifinals in Miami last year and the quarterfinals in Dubai earlier this season, advanced to the third round of a WTA 1000 clay-court event for the first time in her career. Her previous best result in Rome or Madrid was a second-round appearance.<\/p>\n
16th WTA win of the season<\/p>\n
The victory marked Eala\u2019s 16th WTA Tour match win of the 2026 season across 10 tournaments. She also owns the most wins by a left-handed player on the WTA Tour this year.<\/p>\n
Rybakina or Sakkari await in third round<\/p>\n
Next up for the 20-year-old will be either second seed Elena Rybakina or former world No. 3 Maria Sakkari, who were scheduled to play later Friday. Eala has not previously faced either player on tour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alexandra Eala, the first player from the Philippines to appear in the Internazionali BNL d’Italia in the Open…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[27,4125],"class_list":{"0":"post-14135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rome","8":"tag-rome","9":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}