French Open Men's Day Seven Tips: Garin can edge Khachanov clash

 French Open Men's Day Seven Tips: Garin can edge Khachanov clash

Third round action continues at the French Open, and after tipping yet another winner yesterday, here running the rule over the value is our tennis columnist Dan Weston...

Sonego gets the job done for us on day six

Round three in Paris got off to a dramatic start with Hugo Gaston getting the better of Stan Wawrinka in five sets - a real shock - giving Dominic Thiem a real boost in the process. The Austrian was likely to have played Wawrinka tomorrow and now has a much easier match on paper against Challenger Tour player Gaston.

As for our pick, Lorenzo Sonego got the job done for us as a slight underdog. I wouldn't want to say it was stress-free - anyone who saw the third set tie-break will verify that - but that 19-17 tiebreak victory gave Sonego a straight-set win over Taylor Fritz and now he faces Diego Schwartzman in round four.

Anderson could be a tough test for Rublev

Moving on to today, there's a couple of spots that I think worthy of some discussion. First of all, it is interesting to see Kevin Anderson as a 5.20 underdog for his clash with Andrey Rublev. I don't doubt Rublev should be favourite - and a strong favourite at that - but he looks short-priced against a former top five player, and one who has performed well to get to this stage so far with two underdog victories. Anderson is a tough player and will view this as an opportunity to improve his ranking, which has fallen outside the top 100 following injury, and having missed this event last year.

Garin looking like a value favourite

However, our pick for Saturday is Cristian Garin as a 1.84 marginal favourite over Karen Khachanov. The Chilean fits the bill as a young clay-courter which I had pre-identified as a skill-set which has performed well in the warm-up clay tournaments, and he has performed well in Hamburg last week - narrowly losing to Stefanos Tsitsipas in the semi-finals in a tight three-setter.

Quite simply, over the last 18 months Garin has much better clay numbers than Khachanov, with a slight service points won edge on serve, and around a 3% advantage on return points won, so based on that, he should be shorter than the market price on offer today. I have him closer to the 1.60 mark for this, and this discrepancy is enough to make Garin our recommendation for today.

Djokovic among numerous heavy favourites

In other matches, the market pricing seems about right. Roberto Bautista-Agut looked a little value early but has now shortened to 1.81 for his all-Spanish encounter with Pablo Carreno-Busta, while there are also the typical array of heavy favourites that we tend to see in the early rounds of men's Grand Slam events.

Unsurprisingly, Novak Djokovic is the shortest of these, with the market understandably feeling that all he needs to do is turn up and avoid injury to get past the Colombian, Daniel Galan, who has never broken the top 140 in the rankings. Matteo Berrettini, Grigor Dimitrov and Stefanos Tsitsipas are all around or slightly below the 1.20 mark for their meetings with Daniel Altmaier, Roberto Carballes Baena and Aljaz Bedene, respectively. None of this trio either look particularly unjustified as heavy favourites here, so there could be quite a number of routine victories to conclude round three today.