Pegula won their previous meeting, a tight three-set match in the Miami Open semi-finals last year.<\/p>\n
However, Eala has improved since then, notably on her serve. She won 71% of first-serve points against Osaka, and dropped only four points behind her second.<\/p>\n
“I’m more well-rounded 1785661868. I’m physically a little bit better,” Eala said.<\/p>\n
“I played really well, had a great mentality and stayed locked in until the end.”<\/p>\n
Pegula came back from 5-2 down in the first set to beat Russia’s Diana Shnaider 7-5 6-4 and reach a second Washington final.<\/p>\n
In the men’s tournament, third seed Taylor Fritz will face rising Spanish star Rafael Jodar in the final.<\/p>\n
World number 10 Fritz hit 13 aces to beat fellow American Brandon Nakashima 6-3 3-6 6-3.<\/p>\n
Jodar – who will break into the world’s top 20 after starting the year ranked 165th – beat Chile’s Alejandro Tabilo 6-7 (6-8) 6-4 6-4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pegula won their previous meeting, a tight three-set match in the Miami Open semi-finals last year. However, Eala…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":799018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-799017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}