Tennis player Alex Eala beats Sakkari and the rain to reach the Hong Kong Open final

Most players treat a rain delay as an interruption. Alex Eala has started treating it as a reset button. The Filipina reached the Hong Kong Open final on Saturday by beating Maria Sakkari in a semifinal that kept stopping and starting, and the stretch that decided it came only after she had let a winning position slip away.

The reports led with the final and the ranking climb, and both are real. The more telling detail is how she got there. For the second time this season, weather broke up one of her biggest matches, and for the second time she walked back on court as the steadier of the two players.

How Alex Eala lost the lead and won it back

The score was 7-5, 3-6, 6-4 over the fourth seed. Eala took a first set full of broken serve by breaking at 5-5 and serving it out on her first set point, according to Tennis Majors. Then the weather took over. Light rain was falling as the second set began, and Sakkari, a former world No. 3, raced to a 3-0 lead before the stoppages started. When Eala finally earned two break points at 3-5, another shower halted play, and Sakkari came back out to close the set, ESPN reported.

The third set was not tidy. Eala went 3-0 up, then 4-1. She had three chances to break again for a double-break lead in the sixth game and missed them all. Sakkari held, broke and held again to level at 4-4. Rappler, writing for the audience that knows her best, framed the opening of that third set as Eala trying to exorcise “ghosts of meltdowns past”. For a few games the ghosts were winning.

She answered with a hold in the ninth game, dropping a single point, then broke at 5-4 and closed the match on her second match point after Sakkari saved the first. “She really stepped up and brought what she needed to bring to come back,” Eala said of the Greek, “and so I tried every point to stay there and step up myself.” To Rappler she put it more plainly still: “the ability and conscious choice to stay there and be positive was a really big point of my match today and my mentality.”

What she did when play stopped

Asked what went through her head during the rain breaks, Eala gave the answer that explains the result. “I think I was just blank,” she said. “It was a lot of patience.” Then, in the words both the South China Morning Post and Philstar recorded: “I’m really happy that I was able to come out of that a better player.”

Blank is the important word. A stoppage that arrives while you are leaking a lead invites you to sit in the locker room and replay every missed break point. She describes doing the opposite: emptying out and starting again from the next ball.

The numbers back her version. Sakkari had the bigger weapon, with 12 aces to Eala’s two, and she saved 17 of the 22 break points she faced. But she also served six double faults to Eala’s one, while Eala landed 79% of her first serves and broke five times, per Tennis Majors. ESPN counted 60 return points won by Eala to Sakkari’s 38. The bigger serve hit more aces. The more reliable serve got the breaks that settled it.

Washington was the rehearsal

Hong Kong has a precedent from this summer. In the DC Open final in August, thunderstorms pushed the start back by hours, Jessica Pegula took the first set 6-4, and rain and lightning eventually stopped play for the night at 6-4, 1-2. When the final resumed the next day, Eala broke in the tenth game of the second set and won eight of the last ten games, closing out a 4-6, 6-4, 6-0 win on her second championship point, Tennis365 reported. It was her maiden WTA 500 title.

Two of the biggest matches of her year were broken up by weather. Both times the player who came back from the break with the clearer head was Eala.

The rest of the week built to this. She beat Alycia Parks and Tereza Valentova, then needed two and a half hours to get past Antonia Ruzic in a quarterfinal she called “a rollercoaster, for sure, and an incredible battle”. That run made her the first player from the Philippines to reach the Hong Kong semifinals and was set to lift the 21-year-old to a career-high No. 16, Tennis Majors noted. The WTA lists Sunday’s match as the third final of her career.

Claire Liu and the one match Eala lost

The final brings a different kind of test. Claire Liu, the 26-year-old American ranked No. 102, beat qualifier Alexandra Shubladze 7-5, 6-4 to reach her first hard-court final and her first WTA 250 final in more than four years, according to the South China Morning Post. She also owns the only head-to-head result between them: as world No. 305, she beat a top-50 Eala in the first round in Guangzhou in 2025. “I’m definitely going to be the underdog,” Liu said anyway.

The final is on Sunday at Victoria Park, and it is Eala’s last official event of the season before a homecoming celebration at the Philippine Arena on December 8, Rappler reported.

Liu has the head-to-head. Eala has something that record cannot show: two big matches this year in which play stopped, she sat with an empty head, and she walked back out better than she left.

Tags: Alex Eala, WTA Tour, Claire Liu, Hong Kong Open, Maria Sakkari