Isn’t it always sad to see a home crowd not have a team to support on stage?

No, it isn’t. Not when it’s Americans we’re talking about. Then it’s f–cking hilarious (again, sorry to all our US readers).

Autopsies are rarely fun. That’s something we learned from medical school. And by medical school, we mean ‘going graverobbing’. They’re necessary, though - it’s important to know why someone died so we can avoid it in the future.

Or in this case, make sure it happens again.

North American Counter-Strike has been committing slow-motion suicide ever since VALORANT came out, and not just because they had to play it. They lost a lot of players, both current stars and, perhaps more pertinently for this discussion, their future talents.

This, though, is a new low.

Team Liquid dropping out 0-3 was pretty embarrassing, and they’re barely even NA. They have two Canadians and no Americans, and that they were the last hope of the Americans says it all.

And they still let them down.

NAF was also the weakest player and apparently might be on his way out. Fortunately, he’ll have his pick of NA teams to go to if he fancies it because they were all proper tosh.

M80 managed the loss of malbsMd well at first, but it seems to have caught up with them now. That’s not to say Lake has been bad – in fact, if Liquid wanted more NA players, he’d be first choice – but they have other problems. Namely, slaxz-.

slaxz- isn’t very good. He wasn’t very good in Europe, and he’s still not very good in NA. Do you know how bad you have to be to go to NA as a European and not stand out? With the AWP?

smooya dominated NA, for crying out loud.

slaxz- isn’t American, which means that either this is a positive (the European let them down) or a negative (the NA AWPers are even worse). Either way, M80 desperately need an upgrade.

They aren’t doomed, at least, like Complexity.

Complexity went 1-3 in the first stage. This is a team who were in grand finals at the start of CS2. This is a team who spent millions chasing a dream trying to be the best in the world. This is a team that had ELiGE not long ago. They did worse than FlyQuest.

They need a major overhaul. You can perhaps keep Grim and hallzerk (who didn’t play at the Major at least), but the rest of them are not good enough. junior was their highest rated player at the event. Better than slaxz- at least.

We didn’t expect too much of NRG, who weren’t really disappointing, but Wildcard going 2-3 wasn’t great either. The worrying thing for NA fans is that you can combine these three teams and still barely come up with a good NA team.

Grim, junior/oSee, stanislaw, JBa and… erm…

You’re starting to see the issue.

How did NA get so bad? They simply do not have enough good players. M80 have a couple, Liquid have two good Canadians (as long as NAF isn’t permanently crippled) and the others simply can’t compete with the Asian and Brazilian teams.

Now that’s an indictment.