French Open Men's Quarter-Final Tips

French Open Men's Quarter-Final Tips: Fascinating clash anticipated between Tsitsipas and Medvedev

There are two men's singles matches taking place on Tuesday at the French Open as the event reaches the quarter-final stage and Dan Weston is here with his verdict...

Musetti gives Djokovic shock before struggling

Despite three favourites all winning yesterday, day nine's action created a real talking point with Lorenzo Musetti going two sets up against Novak Djokovic before winning just one more game in the entire match as the world number one prevailed in five sets via Musetti's late retirement. This match accurately illustrates the edge that the better players have in the longer format, where variance has less chance to manifest itself.

Diego Schwartzman and Rafa Nadal got their matches won in straight sets, with the Argentine just about covering the game handicap for our recommendation yesterday against Jan-Lennard Struff, while Rafa Nadal eased to a 7-5 6-3 6-0 win over Jannik Sinner.

Following this, Nadal has shortened to 1.62 in the outright market, with Djokovic 6.4 further back, and Stefanos Tsitsipas, who faces Daniil Medvedev today, the third favourite at 9.4 at the time of writing.

Zverev with potential fitness edge over Davidovich Fokina

There's a later start today, at 15:00 UK time, with Alexander Zverev meeting Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in the opening match on the schedule. This is Davidovich Fokina's first Grand Slam quarter-final, with a previous best of the fourth round at the US Open last year and ironically, he met Zverev then.

That particular match ended up in a 6-2 6-2 6-1 win for Zverev, and the duo have met one other time, on indoors in Cologne and that ended up in a straight-set victory for the German as well. Given this, Zverev is yet to drop a set in five sets played between the two players so far.

Another factor which could be an issue for Davidovich Fokina is the fact that he's played 17 sets in the tournament so far, with two five-setters against Casper Ruud and Botic Van De Zandschulp. Zverev also needed five to get past Oscar Otte in the opening round - a nod to that edge to better players in best of five set matches again. Zverev has played 14 sets so far, so three fewer than Davidovich Fokina and that fitness edge is also a positive for the German, who is 1.15 to progress to the semi-finals.

Tsitsipas and Medvedev do battle for the eighth time today

The second quarter-final between Stefanos Tsitsipas and Daniil Medvedev should be fascinating for various reasons. Firstly, there's no love lost between the duo - I'm not sure they're on each other's Christmas card list - but also because Medvedev has won six of their seven previous meetings.

I've spoken before on how sceptical I am on many head-to-head records, but considering these were all within or around a three year period, and the duo have had a similar career trajectory, it probably means more than most.

One of these seven matches was on clay, with Medvedev grabbing an underdog win over Tsitsipas in Monte Carlo in April 2019, but Tsitsipas has a pretty strong data edge on clay even with Medvedev's improvement on the surface. Based on that, the current market line of 1.50 about Tsitsipas looks about right to me.