Iga Świątek resets to beat Alex Eala at Madrid Open and open title defense

MADRID — Ahead of the Madrid Open, the Tennis Channel shared a graphic on X of Alexandra Eala’s projected schedule to the final. This might have seemed a touch premature for the world No. 72, who is 19 and has never entered a WTA tournament without a wildcard, but it looked especially so given her second-round opponent. Seemingly a footnote in Eala’s story was Iga Świątek, defending champion in Madrid, the winner of four French Opens, and already a contender to be the greatest women’s clay-court player of all time at 23.

There are limits to what can be read into a social media graphic, but Świątek’s up-and-down start to the year, which most recently saw her lose to nemesis Jelena Ostapenko at the Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart, Germany, has lent an air of vulnerability to her tennis even on her favorite surface.

In this context, Thursday’s 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 victory over Eala was especially satisfying. All the more so since Eala, a talented left-hander from the Philippines, stunned Świątek in their first meeting in Miami a month ago. On that occasion, Świątek struggled to handle Eala’s angles and her omnidirectional forehand, overhitting on countless returns against a spinny but ultimately very slow serve.

Świątek had to dig deep to ensure she avoided another repeat of that result, recovering from a deficit of a set and twice a break down. The pair’s meeting in Miami had been littered with service breaks, and so it was little surprise when Świątek dropped her serve straight away. She had a couple of chances to break back immediately but missed them both, as Eala’s slow-paced deliveries appeared to affect her timing in the Madrid altitude.

It set the tone for a set in which Świątek held break points in four out of five return games but only converted one — and by that stage, she was already a double break down. Świątek was in control of most of the games and the points but kept overhitting early in rallies, unable to take advantage of Eala’s limited movement on clay by constructing points and instead going for too much too early time and again. There were times when it seemed that she was thrown off by the slowness of her opponent’s serve, borne out by the fact that in the first set, Eala won more points on her second serve (58 percent) than her first (54 percent).

Świątek made 22 unforced errors in the first set, which accounted for 63 per cent of the 35 points Eala won. Świątek was so disappointed with her high error count in the match that she went for extra practice after it had finished. “I just felt like there was some stuff I needed to work on, and it was best to do it right after so the body can remember the good movement,” she explained in a news conference afterward. “We worked for like 30 minutes on the court, so it’s good that I had the opportunity to do that.” She added that the errors in the first set were partly due to her acclimatizing to the Madrid altitude, and that she had increased the tension on her racket at the end of it to try and change something.