We’ve got some apologies to make. Last Sunday, we joined the furor against OG’s presence at BLAST World Final.
Now, those plucky pricks are in the semi-finals. After beating Heroic on Wednesday — which we obviously wrote off as a fluke against a stand-in — the #18 team in the world went and beat Vitality as well.
And it’s a bit harder to downplay that victory. Vitality battered NAVI in their opener and any time you beat ZywOo you deserve to gloat a little bit.
It’s legit. No best-of-ones, no bugs, no veto tricks. Not even a busted M4A1-S. They’ve played more maps than FaZe played at the Rio Major, so we can’t bleat about sample size either.
Now, two best of threes don’t mean Striker was wrong about OG being here. Even N0tail wouldn’t argue they’ve been anywhere near the 8th best team of the year.
But, this year hasn’t gone to plan for many of the top tier. The top ten changes more often than Britain's weather, and despite not really deserving to be here OG have put in a performance of someone who does. That’s all that matters.
We did see some semblance of normality in the other group, with FaZe reigning supreme. Aside from Rio, they’ve gone pretty deep into every event this year, and victory over G2 and Liquid means they have done the same here.
The Liquid win was the interesting one, where we got to see FaZe’s debut on Anubis. karrigan has always loved a veto, but you can’t blame Liquid for letting Dust2’s replacement into the map pool considering they beat Outsiders on it the day before.
What we can blame them for is being absolutely rubbish on it the second time round. karrigan used the post-match interview for the closest thing we get to trash talk these days, saying that Liquid’s T-side was so “slow” and so inattentive to mid that they could play a 2-1-2 comfortably.
FaZe even let Twistzz AWP, proving that not only is the Canadian NA’s best rifler he’s probably their best sniper too.
“Liquid didn’t adapt well enough”, karrigan finished — which is strange, considering we thought that YEKINDAR was Pep Guardiola re-incarnated, with the strat book of prime gla1ve and Jame combined into one superhuman mid-rounding machine. No, just us?