Rune is a player that is extremely aggressive from the baseline and just doesn’t have any glaring holes in his game right now. He also glides around the court rather effortlessly, which allows him to play sound defense when facing powerful opponents. On top of that, Rune is rock-solid at the net and his serve has been tremendous this season. There’s a reason he is mentioned in the same conversation as Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. With that said, Djokovic won’t exactly be able to pick on Rune anywhere, if the teenager is playing well.
The Serbian’s best chance of blowing the Dane off the court would be if the moment is simply too big for Rune. It isn’t out of the question that he’d get a bit flustered seeing somebody as intimidating as Djokovic on the other side of the net. But we’re betting on Rune coming out firing, as he has a good team around him—which includes Patrick Mouratoglou—and has seemingly calmed down quite a bit this year. Rune used to be known for some interesting on-court blowups, but we’ve seen less and less of those—which is why it was actually a little tough to see Wawrinka chastising him after their meeting in this event.
Djokovic is clicking on all cylinders heading into this final, and he has every reason to want to capture all the hardware that he can the rest of the year after having been denied the chance to play in multiple majors. But it’s hard to ask Djokovic to go out there and do more than just win 6-4, 6-4 against one of the hottest players in the world. That’s why we’re taking the 19-year-old on the game spread. We trust him to keep this somewhat close.
The Pick: Rune +4.5 Games (-135)