Why FURIA And Mousesports Secured The Last Two BLAST Spots
The BLAST Premier: Fall Showdown has come to an end and the best teams have made their way to the last BLAST stage of 2020. 16 teams were part of these two Single-Elimination brackets, but only two sides have been given tickets to the Fall Finals. Liquid, FURIA, mousesports, and Cloud9 comprised the last surviving bunch on Sunday and fought it out in tense Best-of-Three matches.
FURIA have now managed to qualify for the BLAST Premier: Fall Finals. This is a notable step-up from their last-place finish in the Regular Season’s Group C alongside G2, MIBR, and Astralis. But before we shower them with praise, we need to consider the road that they had to take during this Fall Showdown. On their side of the bracket, they only had to compete against Isurus, Virtus.pro, and Liquid. This is hardly representative of the overall playing field and on top of that, FURIA didn’t even look that good in their first two matches. Had they been put into the second Single-Elimination bracket, which featured the likes of Cloud9, Complexity, mousesports, and Heroic, they might not have qualified.
Over the course of the weekend, mousesports fans had a lot to celebrate. Most crucially, the roster took down Heroic in a phenomenal Best-of-Three, suggesting that this team is on an upward trend again. This could very well be the work of Torbjørn "mithR" Nyborg, the newly acquired Danish coach. The mouz players had more structure and even Finn “karrigan” Andersen managed to put up a great individual performance. Their takedown of Cloud9 was masterfully executed, but not an achievement in itself as C9 have debuted with a rather inconsistent roster of players. While mousesports and FURIA obviously took to great lengths to deliver a great show, these last two matches felt less like them winning, and more like Cloud9 and Team Liquid struggling to compete.
WHY DID CLOUD9 AND LIQUID LOSE?
So far, Cloud9 have really only been a one-trick pony. Their victory over Complexity was impressive and certainly well-executed on the part of Alex “ALEX” McMeekin, but their decisive defeat to mousesports just goes to show that they’re not ready for prime time just yet. On Mirage, they toyed with the Complexity defence and often made them commit to rotations that eventually cost them the round. But none of that happened in their match against mouz.
After all this time, karrigan still remains one of the most capable in-game-leaders on the planet. On both maps, he had Cloud9 figured out after the first few rounds. ALEX and his men managed to ramp up early leads, but as soon as karrigan had found the key, his team very much ran away with the victory unscathed. After an 0-6 deficit, mousesports only dropped one single round and secured a 16-7 victory on Vertigo. Cloud9 had certainly done their homework against Complexity, but were unable to find the same kind of holes in the mouz defence.
After months of trying, Team Liquid still can’t get ahead of FURIA. The Brazilians used their time in Europe to really grow as a team, despite the players not knowing whether they’ll be on the chopping block in 2021. There were a lot of reasons for Liquid losing to FURIA in their last match, but it overall boils down to one specific issue - and that is Jake “Stewie2k” Yip as an in-game-leader. Overall, the team made some very weird decisions. Once they got off their map pick, they didn’t really know what to do. The mid-round calls weren’t on point, and often times led Liquid to fortify the wrong sites on Inferno. In a 2v2 situation, where the players heard FURIA retreating and moving to A Spot, the two surviving players decided to just sit idly on B and wait it out. They were probably banking on FURIA to fake an execute and get back to the site eventually, but why would they?
Questionable decisions like this were common during this Best-of-Three and left Team Liquid without a spot at the BLAST Premier: Fall Finals. Stewie2k also found himself at the bottom of the scoreboard, which suggests that he hasn’t found a way yet to fulfil both of his jobs appropriately. This unfortunately leaves them with just one single tournament to attend to for the remainder of the year. DreamHack Masters Winter EU has commenced and forces Liquid into a situation in which they will have to fight for a playoffs spot against Astralis, mousesports, G2 Esports, and FURIA. This will be a tough challenge for a team that hasn’t yet played against the top brass of European Counter-Strike.
But FURIA now have the chance to really make their stay in Europe count. For that to happen, however, they will need to compete against much better opponents than anyone the BLAST Showdown bracket has thrown at them so far. The Fall Finals and the IEM Global Challenge will be the real test to see how far they have progressed since their move to this continent.
Images via ESL
