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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
There’s quite a simple ingredient to success: sign ropz.
MOUZ pulled off a pretty impressive run, but sometimes someone puts a wall in the way of you just as you hit top speed. That damned Roadrunner.
With EPL Season 21 nearing its conclusion, the semifinals gave us a glimpse of what the final might look like… at least for one of the teams.
The first semifinal saw Spirit face off against MOUZ, and we can confidently say that 95% of the community expected Spirit to take this one. Sure, they might drop a map, but this one is in the bag, right? Well, wrong.
MOUZ put up a fight, taking Nuke in overtime, followed by a 13-7 win for Spirit on Dust 2 on the back of donk’s usual antics. Surprisingly, the series ended with a tightly contested Ancient, where MOUZ triumphed 13-10.
What’s truly remarkable is that despite donk posting a solid 1.33 rating for the series, we can still say it was a relatively tame performance by his standards. It seems that Spirit needs their star to deliver a 1.60 rating every game to stand a chance.
On the flip side, MOUZ’s momentum from their championship run at Cluj carried into EPL, with their only losses coming at the hands of Vitality, which is starting to make us question just how much of an impact siuhy had on the team.
The second semifinal played out quite differently, as The MongolZ only showed up on the second map of Nuke, managing to close it out in overtime 16-14 after getting crushed 13-4 on Anubis and then even worse 13-2 on Inferno.
There’s not much to say here.
This Vitality team is looking very scary with everyone stepping up - especially ZywOo and flameZ in this series - so the fact that The MongolZ managed to take a map off them is a feat.
Given that few teams have even come close to challenging apEX and the boys, The MongolZ are definitely a team to watch moving forward. We already knew they were good, but it will be exciting to see just how high they can climb.
A couple of exciting semis set the stage for what everyone hoped would be an interesting final, and you will not believe what happened…
Oh, FlyQuest… it seems that even you are sick of watching you play.
If you’ve missed the news coming from middling tier two teams masquerading as tier one teams this week, then you won’t have seen that dexter has been benched by FlyQuest.
This move may be necessary, as FlyQuest has been in torrid form recently, winning just three series and nine maps all year.
It may seem harsh that dexter is the one that has been cut, given that he led the team to their greatest achievement at ESL Challenger Atlanta 2024 and that Liazz is, well, a bit crap, but looking at the changes that have happened since that Challenger win, this is a move we can get behind.
Sure, there might not be any IGLs better in Australia than dexter, but would a good IGL really sacrifice the performances of his star rifler by taking some of his spots from him? That’s exactly why INS has been struggling this year, and when he’s gone from a 1.13 on LAN in 2024 to a 0.93 on LAN this year, you have to question whether those spot changes were worth it.
In case you’re wondering who will take the IGL duties, we’re happy to tell you it will be INS. We know that might seem contradictory to our previous point about his performances, but star IGLs are becoming more frequent, and this won’t be his first stint as the team's leader.
Besides, keeping the IGL duties on one of the four remaining players means that they’ll be able to go and secure a firepower upgrade from another region as they did with regali, right guys? Right?
Yeah, wrong.
Instead, they’ve signed former TALON player nettik, who, in his defense, has been farming ratings domestically for quite a few years now.
So, while this move could work out for them, we still have our doubts. Players from Oceania aren’t exactly known for translating domestic form to international competition.
We do hope it does work, though. FlyQuest have been stinking up events for far too long, but Australian teams actually tend to be quite fun in the rare stints that they’re actually worth watching. And this team also has INS, who is very fun and gets the tl;dr stamp of approval.
At the very least, dexter is gone, and so are his excuses and poor attempts at comebacks. So that’s a win.
Forgive us if we don’t seem to be excited about this, because we’re not. But it is really hard to be excited about Australian CS.
And hey, at least we don’t have to see them play until IEM Melbourne at the end of next month - better get practicing, lads! We would truly hate to see you go out in dead-last (again).
We need to talk about ropz.
You’re going to hear a lot about ZywOo, because he broke an arbitrary record of ‘more MVPs than s1mple’, who notably hasn’t really played the game properly in a few years, but we want to talk about ropz.
This isn’t the first time ropz has joined a team and they’ve just started winning everything. It happened when he joined FaZe, and now he’s joined Vitality they’ve basically immediately become prime Astralis mixed with the Chicago Bulls of the late ‘80s mixed with every team Tottenham play against.
ropz himself didn’t have a particularly stand-out grand final, because the grand final was essentially a non-event. Vitality absolutely battered a MOUZ team who looked more like the team everyone expected when they kicked siuhy.
MOUZ picked up 18 rounds in the BO5, which last time we checked is nowhere near enough. They picked up half of those on Dust 2, which was as close as they got to making this series competitive. Spinx tried, but his old teammates are simply just better than his new ones.
No shade. They’re better than everyone.
ropz might be better than Spinx, too. Not necessarily as an individual, but in that he seems to make everyone else on his team better, and has a fear factor that few other pros have. Watch any comms video or stream where someone is playing against ropz, and listen to what they say when he’s still alive.
It’s very telling.
Nuke and Inferno were as one-sided as Arjen Robben, and this final felt anticlimactic. It wasn’t the best final to watch, but Vitality right now are sh*t hot. It feels like they’re pretty unbeatable right now.
Against all odds, too, apEX is putting forward a fantastic case to be one of the best IGLs ever. His track record, his trophy case, his calling are all bizarrely good.
We can’t believe it either, but it’s true.
EPL S21 final standings:
1st 🇪🇺 Vitality – $100.000
2nd 🇪🇺 MOUZ – $50.000
3-4th 🇲🇳 The MongolZ – $25.000
3-4th 🇷🇺 Spirit – $25.000
5-8th 🇪🇺 NAVI – $18.000
5-8th 🏳️ Liquid – $18.000
5-8th 🇪🇺 G2 – $18.000
5-8th 🇹🇷 Eternal Fire – $18.000
