Alex Eala’s third trip to the Wuhan Open ended the way her last two big matches did. On Monday night she took the opening set 6-4 from China’s Han Shi, a qualifier ranked No. 217. Shi won the next two, 6-3, 6-3, and the 13th seed went out in the first round of a WTA 1000, the tier just below the four Grand Slams.
It’s the third tournament in a row where Eala won the first set of her last match and lost the match. In Singapore last month, Tatiana Prozorova came back to beat her 6-4, 5-7, 3-6. At the Asian Games in Nagoya, Japan, she took the first set 6-3 off Wang Xiyu before losing the semifinal in three.
Thirteen Holds Out of Fourteen
Eala’s first set was untidy even as she won it. Inquirer’s live count had her at 17 unforced errors and six winners for the set.
Shi’s serve decided the rest. She held in 13 of her 14 service games. Eala broke her once all night, converting one of three break points, and won 26 percent of the points played on Shi’s first serve. Eala served no aces and six double faults and was broken three times.
Shi was born a week after Eala, in May 2005, and has never been ranked higher than No. 200. She came through qualifying with a 7-6(2), 6-1 win over Uzbekistan’s Kamilla Rakhimova and played Monday’s match on Center Court in front of a home crowd. She plays Canada’s Leylah Fernandez next, the player Eala beat in Washington in August on the way to her first WTA title.
Year Three in Wuhan
In 2024 Eala got into Wuhan on a wildcard, an invitation for a player not ranked high enough to enter directly, and lost her opener. In 2025 she lost in qualifying. This year she arrived as the 13th seed, five spots above her ranking at the time, after world No. 1 Elena Rybakina, defending champion Coco Gauff, Amanda Anisimova, Victoria Mboko, and Naomi Osaka withdrew. Before the tournament, ElysPlanet wrote that nearly all her good news since the US Open had come off the court, and that Wuhan was where she needed a win.
She slipped from No. 18 to No. 19 in the WTA rankings released Monday, before her match. She had already dropped out of the race for the WTA Finals, the season-ending event for the tour’s top eight, when she skipped the China Open in Beijing to play the Asian Games. Wuhan was her last WTA 1000 of the year, so her first singles main-draw win there waits until at least 2027.
Her week in Wuhan isn’t over. On Tuesday she is back on court in doubles with Turkey’s Zeynep Sönmez, a friend since their junior days, against Ukraine’s Dayana Yastremska and Anhelina Kalinina.
What She Told Sharapova
On Maria Sharapova’s podcast Pretty Tough last week, Eala said she reads her own face between points to gauge how a match is going, and that the worst stretches are the ones where she can feel herself slipping and can’t get it back. She was describing matches in general. Her last three losses each turned in the set after the one she won. In Nagoya, where she had led Wang 5-0 in the first set, she put it plainly to reporters afterward: “I think it happened — momentum shift happened.”
She was the higher-ranked player in all three, by more than 60 places each time. Prozorova was No. 180 in Singapore, Wang No. 85 in Nagoya, and Shi No. 217 in Wuhan.
Three Stops Left in Asia
The Ningbo Open, a WTA 500 in China, starts October 19. The week after, she is in the field for the Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo, the tour’s last 500-level event of the season, running October 26 to November 1 on outdoor hard courts. Rybakina, Jessica Pegula, Elina Svitolina, and Iga Swiatek head that draw.
The Hong Kong Open, a WTA 250, follows from November 2 to 8. Mboko beat her there last year after coming back from 1-4 down in the third set. Eala had won the first set that night too. Her season ends at home on December 8 against Indonesia’s Janice Tjen at the Philippine Arena, where the top seat costs ₱63,000.
Ningbo is six days away.