Eva Lys struggled to hold back the tears after reaching her first-ever WTA 1000 quarter-final. The German has battled through four rounds of action to reach this stage of the tournament, with a third-round win over Elena Rybakina the pick of the bunch.<\/p>\n
Other fallen opponents include Zhang Ruien, Iva Jovic and most recently in the round of 16, McCartney Kessler. Her reward for reaching the last eight of the tournament is a clash against reigning French Open champion Coco Gauff<\/a>, which is set to take place on Thursday.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a remarkable week for the 23-year-old, who had her first win over a top 10 opponent, and as a result of her exploits in China, will move inside the top 50 of the WTA rankings. Unsurprisingly, Lys struggled to contain her emotions when put in front of a microphone following the Kessler victory.<\/p>\n She said on court: \u201cI\u2019m trying to hold back my tears. It was so fun playing in front of you guys.. I didn\u2019t expect to have a lot of fans in China. I really appreciate that. I\u2019ve had some really tough matches, I don\u2019t know where I found the strength, but I just kept going. It means so much to be in my first [WTA 1000] quarter-final.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a breakout year for Lys, who earlier in 2025 reached the fourth round at the Australian Open<\/a> as a lucky loser entrant, sparking a reaction that went viral after discovering how much prize money she’d won<\/a>. Three consecutive second-round runs at the next three Grand Slams followed, with Lys\u2019 only other appearance at a major having come all the way back in the 2023 US Open.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, she also boasts the tag as German No.1 – something Lys has admitted has taken time to get used to. Speaking earlier this year, the tennis ace said: \u201cNow, hearing that I\u2019m the No. 1 is such a weird feeling. I remember as a kid I was watching Laura [Siegemund] and Tatjana [Maria] play when I was still a junior. I couldn\u2019t even play WTA tournaments. It felt like it was so far away.<\/p>\n “I\u2019m definitely adjusting to my No. 1 position, figuring out how to behave, what to do. But, I\u2019m going to be honest, I don\u2019t feel a difference to last time. Even though last time I wasn\u2019t No. 1, we were all very equal to each other, and I think that\u2019s the reason why we\u2019re strong as a team.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eva Lys struggled to hold back the tears after reaching her first-ever WTA 1000 quarter-final. The German has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[146623,6740,14643,79,1068,5838,16,15,35779,11911],"class_list":{"0":"post-463934","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-china-open","9":"tag-coco-gauff","10":"tag-eva-lys","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-tennis","13":"tag-tennis-news","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wta-rankings","17":"tag-wta-tour"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115295064210385028","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}