Australian Open Men's Quarter-Final Tips: Shelton shouldn't be ruled out against countryman Paul

• Khachanov and Tsitsipas through to semi-finals

• Big-serving Shelton to cause Paul difficulty

• Djokovic heavy favourite over Rublev

Shelton's meteoric rise quite the journey

Following wins for Karen Khachanov and Stefanos Tsitsipas in Tuesday's quarter-finals, four more players are competing to join the duo in the semi-finals of this year's Australian Open. Starting at 330am UK time is the much lower profile clash, between the American duo of Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul.

A year ago Ben Shelton was ranked outside the top 500 in the world, and on a lay-off which saw him not make his seasonal debut for 2022 until the Little Rock Challenger event at the end of May. However, Shelton soon showed regular improvement, making a number of Challenger finals and also beating Casper Ruud at the Cincinnati Masters to show his upside which was rubber-stamped by three Challenger titles in three weeks in his home country at the end of the year.

Now the American finds himself in a Grand Slam quarter-final, although it's fair to point out the draw has opened up for him - he's not faced an opponent ranked inside the top 60 so far in his journey which will see him further rise up the rankings having recently moved into the top 100.

Shelton's serve should help him keep this close at least

While opponent Tommy Paul is the favourite at 1.402/5 to make the semi-final, both players will be feeling that they couldn't have envisaged such a draw for a quarter-final of a Slam - at this stage they'd be expecting top 10 opposition.

There's no doubt that Paul has a big edge on experience - although at not this level of Slams - and it will be interesting to see whether this will give him a considerable advantage tomorrow.

The market considers that it will, because there's not much in the way of logical reasoning as to why Paul is so short-priced. Shelton so far in his main tour matches has far better serve numbers, and while Paul has a big edge on return, there's not much difference between the duo when combining serve and return data.

In what I anticipate to be quite a serve-oriented match, Shelton with a +4.5 game head start at 1.9210/11 looks to be a decent enough play.

Djokovic huge favourite for Rublev clash

Later on Wednesday the remaining quarter-final of the round is arguably the feature match, between Andrey Rublev and tournament favourite Novak Djokovic. Unsurprisingly, it's Djokovic who is heavy odds-on to win, trading at 1.171/6 at the time of writing.

On hard court in the last year, Djokovic has a 4-5% edge on both serve and return points won, and this makes it pretty difficult to dispute the market line. Factor in as well that Djokovic has improved in the last six months of 2022, and there's no argument at all - the tournament favourite deserves his status, particularly after allaying doubts about a hamstring injury to an extent.

Djokovic has lost just one main tour match since the quarter-final of the French Open at the start of June last year, and given this, it would be a real shock if he was knocked out tomorrow. However, in what has been a tournament of shocks so far, nothing can be ruled out.