Illustration by: NovaH Source: Michal Konkol / Stephanie Lindgren / Adela Sznajder - BLAST.tv

After a blunder in their opening game versus Legacy, Vitality are in the quarter-finals of the Major.

We say that like you should be surprised, and you really shouldn’t be, but we think we’d all be lying if we say we weren’t even mildly worried of a repeat of NAVI in Shanghai after Vitality lost that opener by such a large margin.

Coincidentally, NAVI will be Vitality’s first opponents in the arena, and we say first because we don’t think that NAVI have a chance in hell of getting out of this one alive.

2024’s team of the year have looked far better in Austin, that is true, but they’re still a far cry from the team that made it to almost every final over a six-month period last year. They’re still not capable of beating a Vitality team that had all the chemistry that made NAVI so strong and the firepower to negate whatever NAVI can hope to hit them with.

As for Vitality, despite that blip against Legacy, they’ve looked exactly as they have done for the rest of the year: unbeatable.

This is their Major to lose. It doesn’t matter how good Spirit are looking, nor does it matter the resilience that MOUZ has shown in the face of elimination. It doesn’t even matter that s1mple is getting closer to playing like his old self with every game he plays. All that matters is that this Vitality team is the best team in the world, and they’re now just three wins away from writing that into history for the rest of time.

In fact, given the win-streak that they held before that loss to Legacy, losing that game may have just been the kick up the arse Vitality needed to actually live up to expectations and win this event.

A loss that would have reminded them that, although they may seem it, they aren’t actually invincible, that reminder may have just been the exact thing they needed to put their minds in order and cement the first season of 2025 as their era.

Honestly, it’s why we think this game won’t be much of a contest. NAVI might look a little better, sure, but NAVI at their best couldn’t beat Vitality pre-ropz, who knows what it would take to do so now.

Vitality will know that this tournament, even after everything they’ve done this year, is the only one that truly matters. Talk about Liquid in 2019, and all of the conversations end with “Yeah, but they didn’t win a Major, though, did they?”

That exact line of thinking is why Vitality can’t and won’t let failure become reality in Austin. And these are big game players we’re talking about too – they’re not MOUZ.