Six days ago, Alex Eala won her first WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) Tour singles title. Two days after that, she and Venus Williams — an all-time great tennis legend, playing her first tournament with Eala since the pair’s debut at last June’s Bad Homburg Open — were out of the Canadian Open doubles draw in straight sets. By Saturday morning in Toronto, Eala was three sets into a match against an opponent who’d just eliminated a Wimbledon champion, and at some point in the second set, she was asking the trainer to check her right foot.

She won anyway. 6-3, 5-7, 6-4, over American Caty McNally, to reach the Round of 16 of the National Bank Open — the tournament’s official name, more commonly called the Canadian Open, a WTA 1000 event, one tier below a Grand Slam and the second-highest level of competition on the women’s tour. That’s the headline result. But the more interesting story is what it took to get there, and what it says about a week that’s actually been a lot messier than “Eala keeps winning” suggests.

A Set Slips, a Body Buckles

The first set went the way most of Eala’s matches have gone lately: clean, controlled, over quickly, 6-3. McNally — a 24-year-old American ranked world No. 70 in singles, a two-time WTA doubles finalist at the US Open, and fresh off a stunning upset of reigning Wimbledon champion Linda Noskova two days earlier — settled in during the second set and started finding her range, particularly at net. Somewhere in that stretch, Eala started dealing with a right foot/ankle problem: a medical timeout, tape being adjusted mid-game, visible discomfort between points. McNally forced the issue and closed out the set, 7-5.

That’s the version of this match that matters more than the final scoreline. A three-set win over a dangerous, in-form opponent is a good result on its own. A three-set win where you’re also managing a physical issue in real time, on a tight turnaround from a title run and a doubles exit, is a different kind of result — the kind that says more about a player’s floor than her ceiling. Eala reset for the third set and closed it out, 6-4, without needing the drama to carry into a second medical stoppage. Whatever the issue was, it didn’t get worse. That’s not nothing.

Eala’s own read on it afterward was closer to relief than triumph. “I think I survived that one. It was tough,” she said, before turning generous toward the player who’d pushed her that far. “I want to thank Caty for a great match, being a great sport. It’s one of those matches that could’ve gone either way. I think it was really down to details and a little bit of luck, so give her her flowers.” It’s not a victory-lap quote. It’s an honest one — which, a week and a half after the biggest win of her career, might be the more useful thing to hear from her right now.

The Week This Actually Was

It’s worth naming the last eight days plainly, because the framing around Eala right now tends to flatten a genuinely uneven stretch into a single, tidy “she’s unstoppable” narrative. She won her first WTA Tour singles title at the Mubadala DC Open in Washington. She then turned around within 48 hours and opened in Toronto with a three-set win over Alycia Parks — itself a bit of payback, avenging a loss to Parks at January’s Australian Open. Her doubles run with Williams, a wildcard pairing that had looked promising after a strong debut at Bad Homburg, ended in the first round here, 4-6, 3-6, to Miyu Kato and Liudmila Samsonova. And now this: a three-set singles win carrying a physical scare.

None of those results individually is a crisis or a coronation. Together, they’re a more honest picture of what a breakout stretch actually looks like up close — not a smooth line upward, but a title, a loss, a scare, a win, stacked on top of each other inside of a week and a half, on almost no rest between cities. The fact that she’s still standing at the end of it, with a Round of 16 spot to show for it, is arguably a stronger data point about where her game actually is right now than any single clean win would be.

Who’s Next

Eala’s Round of 16 opponent is Belinda Bencic, the 12th-seeded Swiss veteran and a former Olympic gold medalist who beat Sloane Stephens and Taylor Townsend to reach this round — a considerably more experienced, more decorated opponent than either Parks or McNally, and the biggest name Eala will have faced so far in Toronto. Bencic has been on tour for over a decade, with wins over Serena Williams among her career highlights; nothing about this next match projects as easy, regardless of the form Eala is carrying into it.

This is a player who, a week and a half after the biggest win of her career, is still finding ways to grind out results when the match isn’t going cleanly her way. That’s a harder thing to do than winning when everything’s working — and it’s the part of this stretch worth watching for again when she and Bencic take the court.