Paris Masters Day Six Tips: Raonic can edge competitive match with Medvedev

Raonic impressing on serve this week

Action in the French capital gets underway at around 1300 UK time, with two superb matches in prospect on the schedule and sometimes unusually for the latter stages of a major men's tournament, they don't look one-sided at all.

In the first encounter, Daniil Medvedev faces Milos Raonic with the Russian having his best run indoors in Paris after three defeats in four matches previously at the venue. It's also fair to suggest that Medvedev's record indoors has been pretty inconsistent for a player of his talent, but he has shown a decent level this week, dropping a solitary set to the Australian, Alex De Minaur.

As for Raonic, his 100% service hold record went yesterday against Ugo Humbert, with the Frenchman breaking in the second set, before the Canadian edged a 9-7 final set tiebreak, saving two match points in the process at 4-6*.

Tiebreaks likely in competitive match

I'm anticipating another close match for Raonic today, with my model giving both players projected hold percentages just shy of 90%, and it's certainly fair to say that both players have also exhibited strong performances on serve this week, winning in excess of 75% of service points apiece.

However, it's Raonic who looks the value in a tight match-up with him being the 2.8415/8 underdog to take this. With at least one, if not several tiebreaks likely to be on the cards, it looks prudent to focus on the underdog here. While I don't really believe that a player's yearly tiebreak record is much more than variance - particularly when a top 10 player is underperforming - it's not a negative that Medvedev's tiebreak record this year is also very poor.

Nadal struggling through to this stage

Moving on to the second semi-final, I think that the market is very accurate for Rafa Nadal who is 1.625/8 for his match against Alexander Zverev. I make the King of Clay 1.654/6, so we are pretty much in complete agreement.

Nadal has struggled his way through the tournament so far, dropping sets against countrymen Feliciano Lopez and Pablo Carreno-Busta, and being pushed to a second-set tiebreak by Jordan Thompson as well in the last 16 - hardly the dominant form that he exhibited on his preferred clay at the French Open where he demolished the field without dropping a single set.

Head-to-head misleading

Despite this, he holds a 5-1 head-to-head lead over Zverev, albeit with three wins on clay where the ability differential is larger, and two hard court wins when Zverev was a young player ranked outside the top 20 - illustrating how misleading head-to-head results can be - and indoors in London last November in the Tour Finals, Zverev eased to a 6-2 6-4 win over the Spaniard when priced as a 3.002/1 underdog.

Zverev is shorter than this today and I think the 2.568/5 accurately illustrates his chances of winning. I'm expecting another extremely competitive match, and I think the neutrals should enjoy the action today with all four players having a decent chance of making Sunday's final.

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