Alex Eala’s last win in Cincinnati came without her ever really being tested — Elena-Gabriela Ruse retired with an ankle injury while trailing 6-1, 3-0, before a lightning delay could even finish the job. Tuesday morning, Manila time, she finally got the real thing. The 21-year-old Filipina took the first set off world No. 10 Amanda Anisimova, a two-time Grand Slam finalist, before Cincinnati slipped away in three: 6-4, 4-6, 2-6.
It’s the kind of loss that answers more than it costs. The walkover against Ruse had left an honest question sitting under the “Eala’s unbeaten run continues” headlines: was she actually playing well, or just the last woman standing? Against Anisimova — a genuine top-10 power hitter, not an opponent forced out early — Eala had her answer inside a set. She won it.
What she ran into after that was the difference between a good season and a great one on tour. Anisimova, a 24-year-old American, reached the finals of both Wimbledon and the US Open last year — the two-time-major-finalist kind of resume that separates the top 10 from everyone chasing it. She’s also, in her own way, a mirror of what Eala is going through right now: Anisimova beat a young Coco Gauff in the 2017 US Open girls’ singles final as a teenager hailed as the sport’s next prodigy, then stepped away from the tour in 2023 for her mental health before rebuilding into last year’s pair of Slam finals. The prodigy label finds most players eventually. What Anisimova has that Eala doesn’t yet is the proof of what it looks like to survive it, disappear, and come back stronger.
Rick Macci, the longtime coach of Serena and Venus Williams, had called this matchup in advance as a genuine measuring stick — a chance to see, in his words, “a great learning test” for what Eala’s game looks like against a player with “clean lethal early strikes.” That’s roughly what Tuesday delivered: a first set won on Eala’s own terms, and a third set, 2-6, where Anisimova’s power finally took over.
Anisimova didn’t downplay how close it was. She called Eala “such a great player and such a fighter,” credited the Filipino crowd support for the energy boost she needed late in a match that ran past her own bedtime, and said afterward that finding her tennis and fighting through the middle stretch was what she was proudest of.
It’s worth saying plainly what this loss doesn’t cost. Eala arrived in Cincinnati at a career-high ranking with the bulk of her ranking points already banked from a summer that included her first WTA Tour title in Washington and a fourth-round run at Wimbledon — meaning there’s very little left to defend for the rest of the season. A third-round finish against a two-time major finalist barely moves that number. What it does is close out the hard-court stretch — Wimbledon into Washington into Toronto into Cincinnati — on a set won against the kind of player who usually doesn’t lose one to a 21-year-old outside the top 15.
The next stop carries its own symmetry. The US Open main draw begins Sunday, Aug. 30, at Flushing Meadows — the same tournament where Eala won the 2022 girls’ singles title as a teenager, four years before any of this year’s run happened. She’s arriving now not as a junior champion returning for old time’s sake, but as a WTA titleholder with nine wins over top-10 players and, as of Tuesday, a real answer to how she holds up against one when there’s no injury or retirement to soften the result.