Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo have made a home for themselves on the ATP World Tour Masters 1000 stage, and they would continue their dominant run of form in reaching the Rolex Paris Masters final.
The second-seeded Polish-Brazilian duo will contest a fifth Masters 1000 final of the year on Sunday, following a convincing 6-4, 6-2 victory over Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares in Saturday's semi-finals. Following an opening round walkover, the tandem have not dropped a set all week, also breezing past Feliciano Lopez and Marc Lopez.
Champions on the hard courts of Miami and clay of Madrid as well as runners-up in both Indian Wells and Shanghai, Kubot and Melo are the first team to reach five Masters 1000 finals in a single season in three years. Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan contested seven such title matches in 2014. They saved all six break points faced in the semi-final and fired five aces in total, including one by Melo to close out the match. It will be the second Paris final for the Brazilian, who lifted the trophy with Dodig in 2015.
Kubot and Melo will face seventh seeds Ivan Dodig and Marcel Granollers, who saved a match point to defeat the sixth seeds, Jean-Julien Rojer and Horia Tecau, 3-6, 7-6(5), 11/9.
The Croatian-Spanish duo, which clinched its berth in the Nitto ATP Finals earlier this week, faced break points at 3-3 and 4-4 in the second set. However, after saving those and forcing a Match Tie-break, they were in even more danger. Rojer/Tecau led 8-5 and held a match point at 9-8, but Dodig immediately erased it with an ace. Just two points later, Dodig/Granollers earned a spot in what will be their second Masters 1000 final of the year, after falling to Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut in Rome.
