Rising tennis star Alexandra Eala will return to the ASB Classic in Auckland.<\/p>\n
The Filipino was ranked 53 in the world when she competed in Auckland this year making her way through to the semi-finals.<\/p>\n
21-year-old Eala is now ranked inside the top 20 after winning her first WTA singles title this year in Washington DC and reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n
She grabbed a number of major scalps in 2026 including wins over five players inside the world’s top 10.<\/p>\n
They were world number one Elena Rybakina, number four Jessica Pegula, number five and two-time ASB Classic champion Coco Gauff, ASB Classic defending champion and world number six Elina Svitolina, and world number nine Iga \u015awiatek.<\/p>\n
Off the court, Eala has become one of the sport’s most recognisable players, with more than 2 million followers on Instagram and nearly 900,000 on Tik Tok.<\/p>\n
“I loved my time in Auckland,” Eala said in a statement. “Of course, the support there was amazing, especially from the Filipino community.”<\/p>\n
Svitolina will defend her title in January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rising tennis star Alexandra Eala will return to the ASB Classic in Auckland. The Filipino was ranked 53…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":811361,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-811360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}