Alex Eala and Caty McNally meet tonight in Toronto in a third-round match that the draw sheet did not predict. Eala was supposed to play Linda Noskova. McNally removed Noskova on Wednesday. The Toronto draw had pointed to a rematch between two of the season’s breakout names. Instead the National Bank Open gets two players who each arrived by taking a seed apart.
Eala is the No. 25 seed. She reached Toronto four days after winning the Mubadala DC Open, beating Jessica Pegula 4-6, 6-4, 6-0 in a final stretched across two days by rain. That made her the first player from the Philippines to win a WTA Tour singles title. It also carried her to a career-high No. 20 in the rankings, five places above the position her Toronto seeding was drawn from.
She has won six matches in a row. The most recent was a 6-1, 4-6, 6-2 win over Alycia Parks on Wednesday. It was her first main-draw win at the tournament and, according to the WTA, the first by any Filipino player in the event’s history. Eala earned 14 break points in that match and converted five. Parks earned two and converted both. “I think I had to take it point by point,” Eala said of the final set.
McNally is ranked No. 70 and needed no seeding to reach the same stage. She opened against Tatjana Maria and won 4-6, 7-6(4), 6-1. She then drew Noskova, the sixth seed, playing her first match since winning Wimbledon three weeks earlier. McNally trailed 5-1 in the opening set. She broke back twice, forced the tiebreak and took it 7-5, then won the second set 6-1. Noskova landed 32 percent of her first serves in that second set. “I had to just focus on my side of the net,” McNally said on court afterward.
The American is 24 and has been here before in a different form. She won the French Open girls’ doubles title as a junior. She was a US Open women’s doubles runner-up in 2020 and again in 2021. Her singles career has been interrupted repeatedly by injury, and the ranking she carries into Friday is well below the career high she set earlier in her career. Her game has not changed shape through any of it. She serves and comes forward, she volleys better than almost anyone in this part of the draw, and she builds points rather than swinging through them.
That is the tactical question. Eala is a left-hander whose return has done most of the damage this summer. In Washington she went through Leylah Fernandez, Elina Svitolina, Naomi Osaka and Pegula, and she did it by putting returns deep and refusing to let rallies settle. McNally’s answer is to shorten the rally herself. Neither has played the other before. There is no head-to-head to lean on and no pattern to fall back on.
There is a Cincinnati thread in this too. McNally grew up in the city that hosts the next stop on the calendar, and she has spent much of her career playing the Western & Southern grounds as a home player. A win Friday would send her into Cincinnati with the best hard-court week of her season behind her, in front of the crowd that has followed her since juniors.
For Eala the stakes run past the round. A WTA 1000 quarter-final run would be the largest of her career, and her ranking position is now close enough to the seeding boundary that Toronto points matter to where she lands in the US Open draw on Aug. 30. She has also become one of the tournament’s draws in the literal sense. Filipino supporters have travelled into Toronto in numbers all week, and this match was scheduled as the closing item on the Centre Court night session.
The winner moves into the round of 16 in a section of the draw that also holds fourth seed Coco Gauff. The loser goes to Cincinnati either way. But one of these two leaves Toronto having beaten a Wimbledon champion and a first-time WTA champion in the same week, and neither result was on anyone’s bracket on Monday. Full career detail on the Filipina is in the Alexandra Eala profile.
