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French Open reaches final eight players
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Sabalenka's serve likely to be too strong
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Pavlyuchenkova today's recommendation
Sabalenka expected to get past Svitolina
Tournament second favourite Aryna Sabalenka is in action in the quarter-finals on Tuesday, and faces Elina Svitolina who continues to try and recover her previous ranking after a long-term absence from tour.
A quarter-final spot in a major will go some way to assist in that purpose, but of course, a semi-final will do even more, but Svitolina is a heavy 4.804/1 underdog to achieve this next objective.
Svitolina has been pretty fortunate in her opening few rounds to face fairly mediocre opposition, but stepped up when it counted in the fourth round against the ninth seed Darya Kasatkina and nicked a tight two-setter via a second set tiebreak.
Conversely, Sabalenka has got through to this stage without dropping a set, although was given a decent test by Sloane Stephens in the previous round.
2023 clay data has the pre-match price pretty fair. Ultimately, this boils down to Sabalenka holding serve around 20% more frequently than Svitolina, and bearing this in mind, it looks like Sabalenka will need a big off-day on serve for her to be seriously pushed here.
Pavlyuchenkova undervalued against Muchova
The other quarter-final features another player looking to recapture her previous ranking with former runner-up Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova facing Karolina Muchova.
It's Muchova who is the 1.664/6 favourite to progress, which is a line I'm struggling to agree with.
Pav has been pretty under-rated in previous rounds - indeed we profited from that against Anastasia Potapova in round three - although she's needed deciding sets with her last three wins.
Those were still impressive in context though, with two achieved as a pre-match underdog and the other against Elise Mertens in the previous round where both players were priced around even money apiece. I do feel that the market sentiment which has undervalued her has continued here.
On clay this season, Pavlyuchenkova has actually held serve marginally more often and also has an edge on return, so there really appears to be no logical reason as to why she's the underdog for this meeting. With an edge on big stage experience too, I'm happy to side with her for this clash.