
This weeks ATP Tennis action at Montpellier, Sofia and Quito is now down to the quarter-final stages. At Montpellier top-seed Goffin carried on his Davis Cup form knocking out Simon (advised 25/1) and he now faces Khachanov for a place in Saturday’s semi-finals. Goffin leads the head-to-head 2-1 and while this is likely to be a closely fought competitive encounter I expect Goffin will emerge victorious as at his best he is clearly the better player. Fifth seed Gasquet (advised 5/1) is through to the quarter-finals and faces a tough test against fourth seed Dzhumur today and this will be their first ever competitive encounter.
Third seed Tsonga (advised 4/1) also faces a tough encounter against sixth seed and Next Gen star Rublev and this will be their first ever competitive encounter on the ATP Tour. Finally, at the time of writing it looked like second-seed Pouille was going to progress to the quarter-finals as he was a set and 4-1 up and he will face the winner of the Paire and Millman match, which he last scheduled game of the day.
At Sofia, we lost fourth seed Kohlschreiber (advised 9/1), who crashed out in his opening match against qualifier Basic from Bosnia and Herzegovina earlier in the week. Basic now faces German Marterer today for a place in tomorrow’s semi-finals, and it will be a major achievement as whoever wins will have reached this stage of an ATP Tour Level tournament for the first time. Second seed Mannarino also crashed out in his opening match against veteran Baghdatis, who now faces qualifier Kovalik for a place in tomorrow’s semi-finals, and if Kovalik wins it will be his best ATP Tour level result since he reached the quarter-finals at Chennai back in January 2017. Third seed Muller is through to the quarter-finals and faces Romanian veteran Copil, who knocked out fifth seed Haase, and sixth seed Troicki is also through and he will face either top-seed Wawrinka or Klizan, who is unseeded this week.
At Quito the second-round matches were still being played at the time of writing and defending champion and sixth-seed Estrella-Burgos will not win his fourth Quito title in a row as he was knocked out by Melzer last night. Also, 2017 finalist and fourth seed veteran Lorenzi also lost against Spanish qualifier Carballes Baena. The fates of top-seed Carreno-Busta and second-seed Ramos Vinolas, who were both in action for Spain in the Davis Cup at the weekend, will be known by the time you read this article, as will third-seed Monfils fate, who was due to face Norway’s talented young star Casper Rudd.