Naomi Osaka PREDICTS Alex Eala Will Be Top 10 Before The Year Ends

She lost to Amanda Anisimova on Monday, but that defeat has made me more certain about her future, not less.

That sounds strange after watching the third set and seeing what appeared to be a ceiling finally exposed.

But I saw something different. I saw a young player being given, for free, the final piece of information she needed with 11 days remaining before a Grand Slam.

My prediction is simple: she will reach the top 10 before the end of this year, possibly as early as the middle of September.

I am willing to put my name behind that prediction because I have played against her myself.

I lost to her in 68 minutes, and that experience gave me a perspective that is difficult to get from watching matches on television.

The ranking arithmetic is one of the biggest reasons I believe the climb will happen quickly.

She is currently ranked 20th in the world and 14th in the season race. The race matters because it reflects what a player has accomplished during the current season rather than over the previous 12 months.

More importantly, she has almost no ranking points to defend. Twelve months ago, she was fighting through qualifying and losing in early rounds.

The points she earns between now and the end of the year will therefore largely be added to her total rather than replacing major results from last season.

The players immediately above her face the opposite problem. Many have strong results from the previous autumn—titles, semifinals, and quarterfinals during the Asian swing—that they must defend.

They have to reproduce those performances simply to remain where they are. That difference is enormous.

I know because I experienced a similar climb. I went from outside the top 40 to number one in approximately 18 months.

When a player has nothing behind her, a good tournament can move her several places.

When another player has a large number of points to defend, that same tournament may barely change her position.

The US Open alone illustrates the opportunity. A champion receives 2,000 points, a finalist gets 1,300, and even a quarterfinal appearance brings 430.

At her current ranking, that is enough to create a meaningful move. Then comes the Asian swing, where the advantage becomes even clearer.

The players above her have significant results from last year to defend. She has almost nothing.

A strong tournament in Beijing or Wuhan could therefore produce a substantial ranking jump while a comparable result from a highly ranked player might merely replace points already on the books.

That is how rankings can appear to move suddenly. The movement was actually building through simple mathematics.

I had been asked repeatedly about her since Washington, and initially I gave cautious answers.

That is what you do when discussing a young player who might simply be enjoying an excellent six-month period.

I am no longer cautious. What I saw across the net in our semifinal was not merely a hot streak.

The match lasted 68 minutes. The score was 6-4, 6-2. My serve was working. My forehand was working.

My legs were working. Nothing obvious in my game had broken down, yet I lost in straight sets.

Afterward, I sat in the locker room and could not identify the moment when the match had escaped me.

There wasn’t one. You do not lose that way to someone merely enjoying a good week.

You lose that way to a player who is better at the fundamental thing that decides tennis matches: knowing what to do with the ball.

Her record against top-10 opponents this season makes that even harder to dismiss. She has nine victories against players ranked inside the top 10, including multiple wins over Iga Swiatek, victories over Elena Rybakina, two against Elina Svitolina, a comeback win over Jessica Pegula in a final, and a victory over Leylah Fernandez during her title defense.

Those opponents possess completely different games. They serve differently, move differently, construct points differently, and attack different weaknesses.

Yet the same player has found a way to beat all of them. That is not nine isolated upsets.

It is one skill being applied to nine different probleMs. This is where I disagree with the consensus surrounding the Anisimova match.

Amanda played extremely well and deserved to win. But I do not believe she solved the problem.

She avoided it. After losing the first set while playing a more conventional match, Amanda changed her approach.

She served bigger, took the ball earlier, and tried to end points within three shots.

That prevented rallies from developing. Amanda herself reportedly explained that she had not solved her opponent so much as found a way to avoid the situations in which she could be solved.

That is an unusually honest assessment, and it is important. The entire tour may now have seen the blueprint.

Shorten the points. Serve big. Take the ball early. Do not allow her intelligence to operate over extended rallies.

But ironically, that information makes me more confident in the prediction. Before Monday, she had a weakness that nobody had exposed.

She therefore had little reason to work specifically on it. Now everyone knows about it, and she has nearly two weeks before the US Open.

The two areas that require attention are her second serve and her return against pace.

Those are technical problems, not fundamental flaws. If I were on her team, I would spend the next 12 days working heavily on the serve.

She is not a physically huge player, and her serve is not among the biggest on tour.

Against someone producing a genuinely heavy first serve, she can be forced into defense rather than allowed to construct points.

The serve is the one shot that does not depend on what the opponent has already done.

That makes it especially important for a player whose greatest advantage is anticipation and problem-solving.

She does not necessarily need to reinvent her service motion. Adding a little pace or introducing enough disguise to make the second serve harder to attack could change the equation considerably.

Technical improvements can happen quickly when the work is focused. I rebuilt my own service motion during a comeback in roughly six weeks.

Repetition, video, and detailed coaching can accomplish a great deal. There is another factor that may have been overlooked in Monday’s result: fatigue.

She won a title in Washington, defeating four seeded opponents. Two days later, she was playing in Toronto.

She played multiple three-set matches, dealt with an ankle issue, and continued through Cincinnati. By the time the tournament arrived, she had played nine matches in 13 days.

Absorbing pace is not passive. On television, a player may appear calm while absorbing heavy shots, but doing so requires the legs to be perfectly positioned for every ball.

After 11 days of constant competition, being a fraction late can turn an aggressive redirection into a defensive shot.

Anisimova would have noticed that immediately. The Grand Slam format changes the situation. There is a rest day between matches.

That matters enormously. The version of this player seen late in a brutally compressed tournament schedule may not be the version that appears in New York.

The US Open gives her time to recover between matches, and seven matches offer another advantage: information.

Most players become physically and tactically less effective during a two-week major because fatigue narrows their shot selection.

Predictability follows. Her game works differently. Her strength is not simply physical endurance. It is the ability to gather information and solve probleMs.

Give her seven matches and she gets seven opponents worth of information. That could make the Grand Slam format work directly in her favor.

Her background also matters. She left the Philippines at 12 to attend an academy in Spain, alone and without speaking the language.

There was no established path for a Filipina player attempting what she was trying to accomplish.

There was no obvious template to follow. I understand something about that feeling. I grew up between Japan and the United States, and there were periods when I did not fully belong in either place.

Tennis became the one environment where the rules remained the same regardless of where I was.

Her experience was an even more extreme version. A child alone in an unfamiliar country without a ready-made blueprint learns to solve problems instead of simply executing instructions.

When that continues for a decade, problem-solving stops being a pressure skill and becomes the player’s natural method.

That is why I believe the tour has struggled to properly scout her. Traditional scouting looks for stable patterns.

Stable patterns often come from being taught within an established system. She built her own system.

Now she is reaching another important milestone. Ranked 20th in the world, she is positioned for a top-32 seeding at the US Open.

That means she should avoid another seed in the opening rounds and potentially have a protected path through the first week.

But the bigger change is psychological. She has spent her career as the player nobody was particularly worried about.

That is over. Every top player looking at a draw will now recognize her name.

The difference between being unnoticed and being feared can be worth games before the first ball is struck.

New York could be particularly well suited to her. The US Open is loud, chaotic, and emotionally demanding.

The crowd can disrupt concentration in ways that other Grand Slam environments do not. Young players often struggle with that atmosphere before learning how to handle it.

Yet she has already demonstrated an unusual indifference to hostile conditions. During Washington, opponents reportedly observed that she did not seem to notice the crowd in the way many players do.

That could be valuable at Arthur Ashe Stadium. There is also likely to be tremendous support from the Filipino community in New York and New Jersey.

Toronto had Filipino flags throughout the stands, despite not being a city with the same Filipino presence as parts of New York.

She could therefore find herself playing what feels like a home match in a country that is not technically her home.

There is, however, a legitimate way this prediction fails. She has never played seven matches at a Grand Slam.

Her best result at a major has been a fourth round. The second week of a Slam is different from anything else in tennis.

The physical pressure is different, the emotional pressure is different, and no amount of preparation can perfectly simulate it.

If she loses in the third round in New York, struggles during the Asian swing, and fails to accumulate the expected points, this prediction could look foolish by November.

That risk is real. I am making the prediction anyway because almost everything we know points in the same direction.

She has already beaten nine top-10 players in one season. That is not a normal record for someone ranked 20th.

And then there was the moment that convinced me more than any statistic. After she beat me, she did not visibly celebrate.

She shook my hand, walked back to her chair, and packed her bag as though she had just completed another ordinary match.

A 21-year-old ranked outside the top 20 had just beaten a four-time Grand Slam champion in a semifinal, yet there was no dramatic reaction.

I have thought about that repeatedly. I believe it means she was not surprised. She expected to win.

And that expectation was not arrogance. She remained completely respectful in every interaction we had.

It simply seemed as though she had assessed the situation beforehand and reached a conclusion that turned out to be correct.

A player who expects to beat top-10 opponents will continue giving herself opportunities to beat top-10 opponents.

Eventually, the rankings have no choice but to reflect that reality. So I am putting the prediction on the record.

Top 10 before the end of the year. I am comfortable with it because I lost to her when everything in my own game was functioning properly.

There are only a small number of players in tennis history capable of doing that to an opponent of that level.

And every one of those players eventually climbed much higher than 20.