Why the crowd was rooting against the home player<\/p>\n
Eala has become one of the most popular names in Asian tennis in a short span of time, and the Filipino community in New York turned out for her match in force. Jovic played through pressure that few American players her age ever feel in their own country, and she brought it up herself afterward, addressing the crowd on court.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know you guys weren\u2019t cheering for me, but you gave me that extra push and you pushed me forward, so thank you for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t a jab. It read more like an honest admission from a player who had just gone through one of the toughest matches of her season. She took the first set 7-5, Eala answered by taking the second 6-3, and Jovic closed out the third by the same margin as the first, 7-5.<\/p>\n
The cost of victory: earrings, a knee and a mental breakthrough<\/p>\n
The match didn\u2019t end without scars. Jovic said afterward that she lost her earrings during the fight, fell on court and hurt her knee, and that the level of tennis on both sides was, in her own words, absolutely incredible. By her account, she had lost several tough Grand Slam duels this season in exactly this kind of match, and this time she managed the closing stages differently, which by her own assessment made the difference.<\/p>\n
It was the third meeting between the two players, and the third time Jovic came out on top. What makes the story more interesting is that despite the rivalry on court, Jovic and Eala are close friends off it, which didn\u2019t stop either of them from fighting for every last point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why the crowd was rooting against the home player Eala has become one of the most popular names…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[25835,185,3038,28,463],"class_list":["post-67212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-coco-gauff","tag-aleksandra-eala","tag-coco-gauff","tag-iva-jovic","tag-tennis","tag-us-open"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}