The final of the Champion of Champions takes place over two sessions of action inside the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes on Sunday when Neil Robertson battles against Mark Allen for the biggest title of the season so far.
Robertson will be looking to make a successful defence of the title he won last year while Allen will be looking to win it for the first time having been beaten in the final by the man he meets here back in 2015. There is no reason to think this best of 19 frame match will be anything but extremely competitive.
Neil Robertson
Robertson has steadily got better the longer this tournament has gone on and he was involved in one of the best matches anyone has ever seen in the semi-final where he and Mark Selby shared six centuries in seven frames. The standard the Aussie can go to when he is pushed is insane but we saw with Judd Trump on Saturday that it isn’t necessarily automatic that you can reproduce an elite performance in the next match but that is the task at hand for Robertson here.
We know Robertson will score well in this final. It is what he does. What will decide whether he wins this final or not will be how he fares in the safety battles and the scrappy frames because Allen isn’t stupid and I don’t see him looking to get involved in a shootout. Clearly if Robertson can be the one who dictates the match and play it on his terms then he is going to be in the box seat. He lost the final of the English Open so he will have the bit between his teeth to win this one.
Mark Allen
Mark Allen goes into this final full of confidence of having beaten the current world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan and the previous one and world number one Judd Trump in the quarter final and semi-final of this tournament but he will also be acutely aware that it won’t matter a jot if he doesn’t follow it up by winning the final. I wouldn’t say he has played his best snooker in those matches but that might be a good thing as he has a good performance in him.
Allen hasn’t won a big title since he landed The Masters in 2018 so nobody can argue that he isn’t due. He should actually be winning a lot more than he does but winning isn’t easy so I would never criticise a player for not winning more. If he wins here he will have this title and a Masters title and a host of China events on his CV so he isn’t doing badly. If he is going to win this final he’ll need to keep Robertson at long range and feed on his misses.
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Head to Head
These two men have met on 18 previous occasions with Neil Robertson winning 11 of those battles and Allen seven. Robertson also leads 99-87 in the frame count between the two which suggests that in the main his victories are of a wider margin than when Allen wins. They have met in two previous finals with each of them winning one of them. Robertson beat Allen to win this tournament in 2015 while Allen got his revenge by coming out on top in the final of the International Championship in 2018. Their last meeting was in the Tour Championship semi-final last year. Robertson won that 10-6.
Betting
There is no doubt that Neil Robertson has played the better snooker of the two in this event but we saw with Judd Trump on Saturday night that you just can’t turn form on and off and that feels like a concern to me here. There is certainly more to come from Mark Allen and it might well be that it comes out in this final where he is the outsider and can play with a little more freedom, whereas Robertson has the pressure of being the favourite and the defending champion.
What I like about Allen here is that he adjusts his game to beat his opponent. He said he couldn’t get involved in a scoring battle with Ronnie O’Sullivan and Judd Trump and he didn’t. He kept them at long range and won the match and he’ll know if he gets Robertson into a scrappy safety game he’ll have the edge here whereas if it is a century fest he probably has no chance. I can’t help but think Allen is overpriced here especially if Robertson hit peak form in the semi-final and can’t find that level again, which is perfectly possible.
Tips
WON – Back M.Allen to beat N.Robertson for a 3/10 stake at 2.63 with Bet365
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