French Open Betting / Editor / 06 June 2007 /

The big showdown can move a step nearer today when Rafael Nadal takes on his great friend and mentor Carlos Moya on day 11 of the French Open at Roland Garros.

Nadal, champion the last two years and coming into the match on the back of an 18 match winning streak in Paris, is hot favourite to beat Moya and move within two wins of making it a hat-trick of French titles in a week which began with his 21st birthday.

Nadal versus Roger Federer in Sunday's final is the re-match the fans all want to see after the Spaniard beat the FedEx in a four-set final last year.

Federer is already through to a semi-final with Nikolay Davydenko despite dropping his first set of the championship in beating Tommy Robredo yesterday in four sets. That ended his record-equalling Grand Slam run of 11 matches without dropping a set.
Russian Davydenko then beat Guillermo Canas in straight sets - which will please Federer after his two defeats in Indian Wells and Miami by the Argentine.

But Nadal is the only man left yet to drop a set this year and he has the edge against 30-year-old Moya, the 1998 champion at Roland Garros.

They have met five times and Nadal leads but only by 3-2 overall and 2-1 on clay. His most recent win over his fellow Majorcan was in last year's Rome Masters in three sets.

There is little to choose between them in titles with Nadal having won 21 to 23rd seed Moya's 19. But Nadal has won four of those this year while Moya has drawn a blank.

And the win/loss record is startling. This year Nadal went into the French Open having won 36 matches and lost just six. As for Moya his record is 21/12.

Moya's best efforts of the season have come in reaching the Sydney final in January before losing to James Blake and a month later when he reached the Acapulco final before losing to Juan Ignacio Chela.

He ran into form in Hamburg in mid-May by reaching the semi-finals before losing to Federer in three sets.

But Nadal is 1.04 favourite again today and is trading at 1.13 with Betfair to reach the final. You can also get odds of 1.74 for him to retain his title.

But before we get to that stage Nadal would have to beat first Moya and then the winner of the other remaining quarter-final between sixth seed Novak Djokovic of Serbia and the only unseeded player left, Russian Igor Andreev.

They have met just once and that was earlier this year in Estoril when Djokovic won 6-2 4-6 7-6 (5).

Andreev, of course, got off to a great start in Paris by beating third seed Andy Roddick in four sets in the first round and that gave him the momentum to reach the last eight.

But 20-year-old Djokovic is favoured to go through against the world No 125 and is trading at 1.6 with Betfair.

A Nadal-Djokovic semi-final beckons.

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