MIAMI — A year after her breakthrough run to the semifinals, Alexandra Eala is into the third round of the Miami Open.<\/p>\n
It was anything but easy for the World No. 29, who needed three hours and 20 minutes to take down veteran Laura Siegemund 6-7 (8), 6-3, 6-3. It was the longest match that Eala has played on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz.<\/p>\n
As Hard Rock Stadium was slowly starting to fill up and come to life, Eala raced to a quick 3-0 lead. But Siegemund, 38, used an array of shots to throw Eala off her game, taking four of the next five games to level the set. After taking a 6-5 lead, Eala let three match points slip away and Siegemund held to tie it at 6.<\/p>\n
The German saved a fourth match point in the tiebreaker before closing it out 8-6.<\/p>\n
Eala showed her maturity and poise in the next two sets, breaking Siegemund early in each and closing them out fairly comfortably.<\/p>\n
“It really was close,” Eala said in her on-court interview after the match. “It was demanding, physically and mentally. But that was one of my goals last year after the tournament, to improve physically. And here I am, fresh as a flower.”<\/p>\n
Eala will play either second-seeded Iga Swiatek or Magda Linette in the third round. The 20-year-old defeated Swiatek here in the quarterfinals last year, the biggest win of her career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI — A year after her breakthrough run to the semifinals, Alexandra Eala is into the third round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124,5516],"class_list":["post-198324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}