So much for lunch. We told you the G2 quarter-final wouldn't take long… and then the world #12 dragged Spirit to a deciding map and six overtimes deep into it before finally being put out of its misery. Our mistake. Falcons, for their part, did the business we doubted them for, downing Vitality 2-1. The reward for knocking off the scariest team on the planet? A date with the one side they can't seem to put away.

Spirit, the world #3 to Falcons' #4, roll in on a 13-match win streak, and recent history says they own this matchup, though not quite as cleanly as the bracket suggests. Falcons did take a 2-0 off them at IEM Rio, before Spirit handed it straight back 2-0 in the same event and then went a step further, 3-0'ing them at PGL Astana. Their last two meetings have ended five maps to none.

The headline, as ever, is donk, posting a 1.48 over the last three months — the best player on either side by a distance, and a rifler at that. Falcons can at least point to one duel that flatters them: in the AWP battle, m0NESY's 1.26 actually edges sh1ro's 1.17. The trouble is that winning it might not matter much, because the man who decides this series is playing a different sport entirely.

Then comes the eternal one more star curse. The man Falcons signed to banish it — karrigan — has been a passenger with a rifle, anchoring the side at an alarming 0.80 over three months while running a (albeit new) system Spirit took apart 3-0 just five weeks ago. He's rated below every Spirit player on the server, donk to zont1x. When your IGL is the worst gun in the building and the other team owns the best, it starts to get grim in a hurry.

There is, in fairness, one flicker of hope, and its name is Nuke. It's the single map in the pool where Falcons have a better win rate than Spirit, and it’s the one map Spirit look truly mortal on. The snag? Spirit won't touch Inferno, so they'll happily bin it, while Falcons, who won't go near Overpass, give a ban straight back. That hands Spirit a veto where they get to point at Dust2 and Ancient — two of the highest win-rates on any map in the building — and dare Falcons to name a third map they're actually favoured on. Spoiler: there isn't one.

So Falcons will likely lock in Nuke, pray, and hope donk decides to be human for once. He won't.

We won't make the lunch-alarm mistake twice. If G2 can take Spirit to six overtimes, a Falcons side with actual firepower (and a semi-recent 2-0 over this team in the back pocket) can absolutely make a night of it. They'll probably still lose. But "probably" is doing more work than Spirit would like.