Alex Eala’s Wuhan Open run ended on Monday evening when qualifier Shi Han of China beat her 6-4, 3-6, 3-6 in the round of 32 at Dongfeng Voyah Center Court. Eala had taken the first set, but Shi overturned the match and closed out her first WTA 1000 tournament win.
That result mattered beyond one match because Eala had been looking to build momentum in China, where the next stop on her schedule is the WTA 500 Ningbo Open starting on Oct. 19. The loss also made it her second straight opening-round defeat on the WTA Tour, a run that has left little room for a slow reset.
The opening set suggested a different finish. Eala won it 6-4 even though she spent much of the early going under pressure, committing 17 unforced errors to Shi’s 11. Once Shi found a foothold, the pattern changed quickly. She broke Eala in the seventh game of the second set, took that set 6-3, and held the same line in the third.
Shi’s result was built on more than one sharp night. The win gave her a third straight victory against a top 100 player after previous wins over Kamila Rakhimova and Peyton Stearns. For Eala, it added to a difficult stretch that already included a last-16 loss at the Singapore Tennis Open to Tatiana Prozorova in three sets and, 11 days earlier, a defeat to Wang Xiyu in the 20th Asian Games semifinals.
For now, the question is not whether Eala can create chances; she already did that against Shi. It is whether she can turn those starts into finishes before the Ningbo Open begins on Oct. 19, because the margin in her recent losses has been there to see and too often gone in the final two sets.
