Alex Eala won the first set against Diane Parry on Monday night in Ningbo, China, and the match stayed hers. She beat the Frenchwoman 6-3, 6-1 in 1 hour and 17 minutes in the first round of the Ningbo Open, a WTA 500 event, one tier below the WTA 1000s. It was her first win on the WTA Tour since the second round of the US Open.
A week earlier, ElysPlanet counted three straight events in which Eala had won the first set of her last match and lost the match. The third was her first-round loss in Wuhan to China’s Han Shi. Ningbo ended that run on its first night.
Seven Games in a Row
The opening set was even for a while. Parry, ranked in the low 30s, was meeting Eala for the first time, and the two traded early breaks before standing at 3-3. From there Eala won seven straight games, closing the set 6-3 and going up 4-0 in the second. Parry won one game before Eala served it out.
That stretch is the part worth noticing. On Maria Sharapova’s podcast Pretty Tough this month, Eala described the spells when she can feel a match slipping and can’t pull it back. After her Asian Games semifinal loss to Wang Xiyu in Nagoya, Japan, where she had led 5-0 in the first set, she called it a momentum shift. Against Parry the shift ran in her favor, and she rode it to the end.
“I’m very happy with my performance,” Eala said on court afterward. “I think it was a really good first round, tough first round. Diane is a great player and I think she’s had a really good year.”
It was also her first main-draw match in Ningbo. In 2024 she lost there in qualifying, the preliminary rounds lower-ranked players go through to earn a place in the main draw, to Australia’s Priscilla Hon.
A Pole Vaulter Takes Her Side
The same day, Filipino pole vaulter Ernest John “EJ” Obiena posted a long message on social media defending Eala from the online criticism that followed Wuhan. Obiena, 30, kept his Asian Games title with a Games-record 5.91 meters in Nagoya last month, at the same Games where Eala took bronze in singles.
“So asking if Alex’s string of losses suggests she has failed is the wrong question (or for any national athlete for that matter, yours truly included),” he wrote.
He asked fans to change how they react to a bad result. “If you want to help Alex, me, or any athlete, pick us up when we are down,” he wrote. He also dedicated the message to the Filipino athletes competing at the Asian Para Games in Nagoya this week.
The criticism had been building since September. Eala lost in the third round of the US Open, then in the round of 16 in Singapore to Russia’s Tatiana Prozorova, who was ranked No. 180, after leading by a set. Wuhan was the second tour event in a row where she went out to a player ranked well outside the top 100.
Back to No. 18
The Wuhan loss cost her ground in the rankings. She entered Ningbo at No. 20, two places below her career high. The win over Parry puts her back at No. 18 in the live rankings, the running projection updated after each result before the official list comes out on Monday.
It was her 34th tour-level match win of 2026. Before this season, she had won 15 in her whole career.
Shnaider Next, on Thursday
In the round of 16 on Thursday, October 22, Eala plays Russia’s Diana Shnaider, the sixth seed and world No. 13, with a quarterfinal place at stake. Shnaider beat Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva 7-5, 7-6 (4) on Tuesday to set it up. The two have never met on tour, and both are left-handers. The top of the draw is heavy, with world No. 1 Elena Rybakina, Jessica Pegula, Elina Svitolina, and Iga Swiatek all entered. The tournament runs through October 25.
Two more stops in Asia follow. The Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo, the tour’s last 500-level event of the season, runs October 26 to November 1, and the Hong Kong Open, a WTA 250, runs November 2 to 8. Her season ends at home on December 8 against Indonesia’s Janice Tjen at the Philippine Arena, where the top seat costs ₱63,000.