Melbourne Storm are quite rightly the favourites for what should be an extremely competitive game as we head into the finals but we’re not necessarily looking at Manly Sea Eagles to win – just score points .

The Storm welcome back a lot of players who will be fresh. But the game could well be played at a torrid pace and if any of those players lack a bit of match fitness, they may well be gasping as the game progresses. And let in a few tries.

With possibly the best player in the NRL at the moment in Tommy Trbojevic in the Eagles side, they have a player that knows how to get to the line. He is second on the total tries scored this season (with 25) while third on that list is also an Eagles player in Jason Saab.

Add to that, the NRL’s top points scorer this season is Manly’s Reuben Garrick (with a club record 304 points) so they certainly have the talent to accumulate points in this match.

So we think the Eagles can score over 17.5 points and return us $1.83

We’re into the preliminary finals of the AFL season on Friday night and we really like the chances of the Melbourne Demons. They are the top seed and minor premier winners.

In the first round of the play offs they were super impressive in putting away Brisbane Lions 93 to 60. That gave them a rest week last weekend and they’ll be freshened up nicely for this match.

Their opponents, the Geelong Cats, are a good side and in fact this will be their fifth preliminary final in six years! After a slow start in the match against Greater West Sydney last weekend, the Cats finished strongly with their key forward star Tom Hawkins kicking 3 goals (5 in the match) in the final term for them to run away with the game.

The Cats captain Joel Selwood became the club’s all time games record holder last week (333 games) and you can be sure he’ll lead a strong challenge to the Demons.

But they can’t afford to give Melbourne a lead – Geelong’s game was very scrappy early on last week and their performance against Port Adelaide the week prior was poor.

And the Round 23 match against the Cats will be fresh in the minds of the Demons – they came back from 44 points down in that match with skipper Max Gawn scoring the winner after the siren. We think they won’t leave that to chance this time and look for the Demons to win by + 11.5.

Grand Slam tennis brings out the best, and the best in the players. And this week we've been able to watch a lot of great matches at the US Open.

By the time the final comes around, we hope you’ll enjoy having an interest in the semi final as well – because our selection is for number 1 seed Novak Djokovic to win the FINAL of the US OPEN Tennis

Novak has no Nadal or Federer to contend with this year and has slowly built to the semis at this stage

He has to get past number 4 seed Alexander Zverev on Saturday to reach the final but should he do that, then we don’t see him losing the final and becoming the holder of all four grand slams in one year!

Novak has had an amazing year and his one slip up was at the Olympics in July when in fact Alexander beat him in 3 sets. But Novak also lost to Pablo Carreno-Busta at that tournament so we wonder if the hot conditions saw him off his best performances.

He didn’t play any tournaments the whole of August and went straight into the US Open last week … clearly a strategy that he knows is best and we look for him to produce the two wins over the weekend to take out the title.

Come the final, the $1.53 might look attractive, albeit it is short odds.