Squaring off for the first time against a compatriot he has looked up to growing up, the motivation is high for Denis Shapovalov when he meets Milos Raonic at the Mutua Madrid Open on Thursday. And while not typically either player’s strongest surface, the two Canadians have impressed this week on clay in the Spanish capital.
View FedEx ATP Head2Head for the following matches from the 2018 Mutua Madrid Open & vote for who you think will win!
Raonic vs Shapovalov | Nadal vs Schwartzman | Goffin vs Edmund
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#NextGenATP Shapovalov scored his first ATP World Tour clay-court match win in the opening round over Tennys Sandgren before backing it up with a 38-winner display to edge past experienced Frenchman Benoit Paire in three sets. Former World No. 5 Raonic, playing his first tournament since withdrawing from the Monte-Carlo Rolex Masters, pulled off his biggest win of the season to deny third seed Grigor Dimitrov in a three-set second-round clash. Victory over Dimitrov broke a six-match losing streak against Top 10 opponents.
It will be World No. 43 Shapovalov’s flashy lefty shot-making against the more composed heavy-hitting right-hander, Raonic, with the winner of the all-Canadian battle to meet either Brit Kyle Edmund – after he ended Novak Djokovic’s run on Wednesday – or Belgian eighth seed David Goffin. It will be Goffin’s first clash with Edmund since his comeback from two sets down in the Davis Cup final in 2015.
Currently sitting at No. 24 in the ATP Rankings, Raonic continues to rebuild towards a return to the Top 10. He was forced to withdraw ahead of his third-round match against Marin Cilic in his first clay-court outing of the season in Monte-Carlo with a right knee injury. A quarter-finalist in Madrid in 2015 and 2016, he had high praise for the 19-year-old Shapovalov ahead of their third-round showdown.
“I think he is incredibly talented, very explosive. He can do a lot of incredible things,” Raonic said. “He has been playing great on tour since the Rogers Cup in Montreal last year. He has had some great wins. It is going to be a very difficult match.”
It will be another match on clay and another record on the line on Thursday when top seed and five-time champion Rafael Nadal takes on No. 13 seed Diego Schwartzman for a place in the quarter-finals. Should the Spaniard defeat the Argentine in straight sets he will break John McEnroe’s mark for the longest set streak on any surface in the Open Era.
McEnroe notched 49 straight sets on carpet in 1984. Nadal has won his past 20 matches on clay and 48 straight sets on the surface. He leads the 25-year-old Schwartzman in their FedEx ATP Head2Head series 4-0, including two wins on clay.
Nadal surrendered a mere four games against former World No. 6 Gael Monfils in his opening match in Madrid on Wednesday, having arrived on the back of 11th titles in Monte-Carlo and Barcelona. Schwartzman, meanwhile, registered back-to-back wins over lefties – Adrian Mannarino in the first round and Madrid resident Feliciano Lopez in the second round – to reach the Round of 16. The Argentine already has a clay-court trophy in the bag this season, having triumphed at the Rio Open presented by Claro.
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The man to have most recently defeated Nadal on clay, fifth seed Dominic Thiem, will bid for a quarter-final berth when he takes on 21-year-old Borna Coric on Thursdsay. The Austrian – tied with Alexander Zverev and Juan Martin del Potro for an ATP World Tour-leading 22 match wins this season – is level at 1-1 in his FedEx ATP Head2Head series with the Croatian. He beat Coric in the quarter-finals in Madrid last season before Nadal brought his run to an end in the final.
He would later avenge defeat to see off the Spaniard in the Rome quarter-finals. Thiem and Nadal are on course to again meet in the quarter-finals in Madrid.
Also in action, fourth seed del Potro will look to reach the Madrid quarter-finals for the first time since 2012 when he meets Serbian qualifier Dusan Lajovic. Second seed Zverev will be aiming for his 10th clay-court match win of 2018 when he faces Argentine Leonardo Mayer in the third round.
