Miami Open men's final preview: Casper Ruud vs. Carlos Alcaraz

WATCH: Tennis Channel Live previews the Miami Open men's final between Carlos Alcaraz and Casper Ruud.

There’s a tortoise-versus-hare quality to this final. Ruud and Alcaraz are two up-and-coming players looking for the first of what may be many Masters 1000 titles, but they’ve taken roads of very different lengths to get here.

Ruud is, relatively speaking, the tortoise in this formulation. The Norway native is 23; he has been a pro for seven years; he has won seven titles; and he is fairly well established in the Top 10. The fact that his first Masters final will come on hard courts, rather than his favored clay, is a surprise, but his presence in a final this big is, if anything, a little overdue.

That makes Alcaraz the hare. The Spaniard is 18; he started the year outside the Top 30; and he has won just two titles—one of which came in February in Rio. While Ruud has taken his rise one step at a time, and in the shadow of better-known and more successful young players like Stefanos Tsitsipas and Daniil Medvedev, Alcaraz’s ascent has been meteoric; he’s coming up fast in everyone’s rearview mirrors and threatening to leave them in the dust. The biggest question now isn’t whether he’s going to win a Grand Slam title someday; it’s whether he’s going to win the next Slam, at Roland Garros.

Ruud and Alcaraz have games originally made for clay. Both of Alcaraz’s titles, and six of Ruud’s seven, have come on dirt. Which makes this the rare hard-court final that could serve as a preview of what we’ll see in the later rounds at Roland Garros two months from now. Both players both love to rally, they both have solid two-handed backhands, and they have two of the best and most dangerous forehands on tour. Their match will be a good showcase for how much that shot has come to dominate men’s tennis, and what two state-of-the-art versions of it look like.

These two have met once—on clay in Marbella last year—and Alcaraz won, 6-2, 6-4. But the rematch should be closer and longer. In his last two rounds, against Miomir Kecmanovic and Hubert Hurkacz, Alcaraz has played four tiebreakers; by winning three of them, he’s shown an ability to sneak through sets with slightly less than his best, something that will serve him well in the future. Ruud, meanwhile, has beaten two Top 10 seeds in Cameron Norrie and Alexander Zverev; he called the latter the biggest win of his career.

Ruud and Alcaraz are Masters 1000 final rookies, but Ruud is the more experienced player in general, which should make him more reliable and less likely to throw in a clunker of a Sunday performance. But Alcaraz, with his foot speed and power from both sides, can already reach levels where Ruud can’t follow. And for him, the bigger the stage, it seems, the better. I’ll take the hare, by a hair. Winner: Alcaraz