We said yesterday that Falcons surely couldn't nail consistent 1v1s, 1v2s and 2v5s every round, and that if anyone was going to try, it'd be them.

They tried. It didn't work.

Falcons picked Nuke and then failed to win a single round on it until the twelfth, which took a karrigan 1v2 to get. And if karrigan winning a clutch sounds like the high point of his evening, that's because it was - he finished the map on a 0.62 with 36.3 ADR.

The finest moment of that T side was kyousuke's quick triple kill with a Deagle on A, which was genuinely beautiful, but it also didn't impact the f-cking game in the slightest.

And here's the thing; Spirit weren't actually all that good either. They just never had to be.

Because when Spirit finally had to attack something, they were dreadful. They won eight of twenty-one T rounds across the series. Their Nuke T half was a 2-7 capitulation where not one player broke a 1.00, donk managed 38.7 ADR, and zont1x put up a 0.29 rating and 17.8 ADR across nine rounds. That's nine rounds of a semi-final that he spent doing nothing whatsoever.

Ancient saw a more respectable 6-6 half, but Spirit only looked like a proper team on the CT side. TeSeS clutched a 1v2 in the twenty-third to keep Falcons alive for one more round and m0NESY, last man alive in the final round, brought a 1v4 so close to completion that donk visibly stopped celebrating for a moment.

m0NESY, alone, couldn't get it over the line, and it seemed that nobody was coming to help him. NiKo went 21-33 across the series with karrigan not far behind at 19-33.

So, Spirit go to the final against MOUZ, ten series unbeaten, despite not being a good team for a full forty minutes.

That's what's so frightening about this Team Spirit lineup. They're not playing particularly well. They're just not losing.