For the first time, the Philippines has a champion on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, and her name is Alexandra Eala.<\/p>\n
The 20-year-old’s history-making efforts for her country took another step Monday, as she came from behind to finish a victory against top seed Jessica Pegula 4-6, 6-4, 6-0 in the rain-delayed final of the Mubadala DC Open.<\/p>\n
The match was suspended on Sunday night after extensive rainfall with Pegula leading 6-4, 1-2. But from 6-4, 4-3 behind, the Filipina wrestled control away and never looked back. She won the last nine games, including a 6-0 third set where she dropped just eight points.<\/p>\n
The meaning behind the milestone<\/p>\n
In her last appearance in a tour-level singles final, Eala came up agonizingly short. She had four championship points against Maya Joint at the Lexus Eastbourne Open last year, but fell in a third-set tiebreak.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eala now is tied with Elena Rybakina and Elina Svitolina with seven Top 10 victories this season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time, the Philippines has a champion on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, and her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":801635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428,1959],"class_list":["post-801634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801634","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=801634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/801635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}