Basel Finals Beanalysis

This has been a great week full of tennis, with a promising final matchup to top it all off. I definitely think I picked the right week to do this, because it was a lot of fun to write on these matches. I hope you enjoy this final Beanalysis for the year. (P.S, big things coming in the off-season, dont miss it!) Anyway here you go!

Auger Aliassime vs. Rune

A player makes 3 consecutive finals, winning the first two, and the third is yet to come. Who would you have thought I was describing before these last few weeks? I bet it wouldn’t have been FAA. It wouldn’t have been for me either. Felix is just overwhelming everyone it seems. I’m 99% sure FAA sold his soul for tennis skills. I said in the last writeup that I would’ve said FAA’s serve could cause trouble, but Alcaraz’s returns looked too good to count out. It was apparently not the case because Alcaraz had some abysmal stats when it came to returns. 6 out of 33 first serve returns won, and 7 out of 18 second serve returns won. Good grief Felix. That serve is scary man. In terms of other shots, I feel like they were very equal. The fast courts definitely played into Felix’s favor because he was able to hit more stuff past Carlos that wouldn’t have been possible without a fast court. There were great shots from both, but Felix just looked more clean. In my opinion, there should be a waiver for Rune that says “I consent to this horrific beatdown”, because this is looking bad for him.

Rune squeaked past RBA in two tiebreak sets, with pretty bad return stats, and good serve stats. The match seemed pretty normal, nothing special, but there might be some bias because I had just watched Felix and Carlos play some of the best tennis I’ve seen recently. Rune looks like he’s pulled his mental game together well, and his shots are getting better as well. He takes those forehands on the rise, and its super aggressive in order to make his opponent hit a poor shot that he can run up to the net on and use that finesse to finish the point. I really think Rune deserves to be in the final, he’s pulled off some really great stuff here. In terms of who’s going to win this next match, it has to be Felix, simply because his serve is incredible, and if he can manage one good return game per set, there’s little to no chance Rune can turn it around, because his returns weren’t great in the semis, and I doubt he can change it enough to make a difference here. FAA in 2 great sets of tennis.