Filipino tennis player Alexandra “Alex” Eala’s career-best seven-match winning streak is over. Belinda Bencic, the 12th-seeded Swiss veteran, beat her 6-4, 6-0 on Centre Court at the Sobeys Stadium in Toronto, ending Eala’s run at the Round of 16 of the National Bank Open — the tournament’s official name, more commonly called the Canadian Open, a WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) 1000 event, one tier below a Grand Slam. It was the first time the two had ever played each other.
That scoreline is going to look worse than the match actually was for about half of it. The first set was close, a real fight that went the distance to 6-4. The second set wasn’t — Eala didn’t win a game. Somewhere between those two sets, the story of this loss stopped being about Bencic’s game plan and started being about how much tennis Eala’s body had already played.
A Set Slips, Then the Legs Go
Eala came into this match on her eighth match in 13 days — a stretch that included winning her first-ever WTA Tour singles title at the Mubadala Citi DC Open in Washington, a straight-sets doubles exit with Venus Williams days later, and back-to-back three-set singles battles against Alycia Parks and Caty McNally just to reach this round. The McNally match alone ran two hours and 39 minutes and included a medical timeout for a right ankle Eala had rolled mid-rally — an issue she and her team called minor, but one more thing asking something of a body that hadn’t had a real day off since Washington.
Bencic, for her part, wasn’t fresh either — she’d needed three hours and 24 minutes to escape Taylor Townsend in her own Round of 32 the night before. But Bencic is 29, a decade into a career that includes a 2020 Tokyo Olympic gold medal (awarded in 2021, after the Games were postponed a year), a career-high ranking of world No. 4, and a title at this exact tournament back in 2015, where she beat Serena Williams in the semifinal and Simona Halep in the final. She knows how to close a match out on fumes. On Monday, that experience showed up as a first set she had to work for and a second set where Eala had simply run out of whatever she’d been running on to survive the last two rounds.
The Fortnight That Caught Up With Her
None of this erases what got Eala here in the first place. Three weeks ago, she became the first Filipino player to reach the fourth round at a Grand Slam, at Wimbledon. She followed that with a title run in Washington that included wins over three top-15 players in succession — Elina Svitolina, Naomi Osaka, and Jessica Pegula — capped by her first WTA Tour singles trophy. She arrived in Toronto on almost no rest and still fought through two three-set matches to reach the Round of 16 — a Round of 16 finish that, regardless of Monday’s result, guarantees her at least ₱4.97 million in prize money and more points toward a ranking that’s already climbed into the world’s top 20 for the first time in her career.
None of that happened by accident, and none of it gets erased by one lopsided set against a former world No. 4. It’s worth sitting with that contrast for a second: the same two weeks that produced a maiden Tour title and a career-high ranking also produced the fatigue that showed up so plainly in that second set. Those aren’t contradictory facts. They’re the same fact, looked at from two different angles.
A 6-0 second set is a bad look on a scoreboard. It is not, on its own, evidence that anything about her game has regressed. It’s what happens when a 21-year-old who’s played nearly every day for two weeks runs into a 29-year-old former world No. 4 who’s built an entire career out of knowing exactly when an opponent has nothing left to give.
Where She Goes From Here
The winner of Eala-Bencic was always going to face Coco Gauff, the world No. 4 and fourth seed, who beat 19-year-old qualifier Alina Korneeva 6-3, 6-1 earlier the same evening — a quarterfinal Eala won’t get to play this week, but a reminder of exactly the caliber of player she’s now routinely sharing a draw with.
What matters more for Eala than this particular result is what’s directly in front of her: the Cincinnati Open, the last hard-court tune-up before the US Open, the final Grand Slam of the season. It’s a tournament built for exactly this kind of reset — a chance to arrive with fresher legs, less accumulated mileage, and no streak left to defend, only a ranking still worth protecting and a US Open field she’ll enter as a genuinely dangerous seed rather than a surprise. The version of Eala that showed up in that first set against Bencic — competitive, composed, a break away from taking it into a decider — is still very much in there. She just needs to not be playing her eighth match in two weeks the next time she needs it.
That’s the real headline out of Toronto, more than the 6-0. A player who was, by her own account, running on fumes still took a set off a former world No. 4 and Olympic champion before her body finally said no. Painful as Monday was, that’s a floor most players her age haven’t built yet — and it’s exactly the kind of foundation a deep US Open run gets built on.