Falcons, Mouz, and Spirit were eliminated on the first day of the Arena at ESL One’s Dota 2 event in Birmingham.
Falcons and Mouz lost their Lower Bracket Round 1 matches, before a barnburning contest between Xtreme Gaming and Spirit resulted in Xtreme claiming a startling 2-1 victory.
MOUZ and Falcons lose in Lower Bracket Round 1
MOUZ didn’t have a single drawn Bo2 in the Group Stage; it was either 2-0 or 0-2 for an overall 4-0-3 series record.
Therefore, things were looking very good for MOUZ when they took Game 1 extremely comfortably against an Xtreme that only won one series Bo2 series in Group B.
However, Xtreme were not to be beaten easily with Wang ‘Ame’ Chunyu’s Weaver obliterating MOUZ in Game 2 behind a 15/2/15 statline.
MOUZ had no answer in Game 3, unable to even kill Ame (or Lin ‘Xxs’ Jing) as XG converted the series with Cheng ‘NothingToSay’ Jin Xiang shining on Puch.
MOUZ continued their disappointing run after PGL Wallachia Season 6 victory. Falcons were much the same in a despondent 0-2 loss to Parivision.
Parivision continued their pattern of no pattern. That is to say that Clement ‘Puppey’ Ivanov’s drafts were unreadable to Falcons who had no answers once in the server.
While Falcons fail to find answers in the new patch, Parivision seems revived by it as they continue on to their Lower Bracket Round 2 match against Aurora.
Xtreme outlasts Spirit in Birmingham
Xtreme Gaming’s day was not over, with their Spirit in their way in Lower Bracket Round 2. Spirit was sent there after a 2-1 series loss to Yandex owing to a slow start.
That threatened to happen again as Xtreme started better, with Puck and Gyro starting strong. But it wasn’t enough to overcome Spirit’s classic late-game fightback as they slowly picked Xtreme off before they scaled enough to run them over.
Game 2 saw NothingToSay on Leshrac deny the threat of Spirit’s late-game surge, with a huge fight at 25-minutes setting up the Roshan and springboarding them to a 42-minute victory.
The deciding game was nothing like the previous two. In an hour-long contest, both teams fought tooth and nail to stay in the competition
Ame, Xxs, and NothingToSay above all had significant advantages early in the game, leading by 8k at 15 minutes, but the Chinese roster made poor mistakes to give away a kill each, letting Spirit back in.
A huge Aegis power play restored the lead, with Ame decimating Spirit for a 3-0 teamfight. Still, Xtreme couldn’t shake Spirit, claiming big money kills against Ame to keep it competitive.
Illya ‘Yatoro’ Mulyarchuk’s Morphling thought that it was time to activate, but a series of fights left Spirit baited in to trying to steal the Roshan, allowing Xtreme to claim a decisive teamfight win even with missing out on the Aegis.
Xtreme removed the top and mid defences, but an Ame overstep soon reversed their fortunes, and suddenly it was Spirit putting the pressure on.
Spirit then forced the fight onto Ame, they got the kill, but the buyback came through, resulting in four Xtreme members living in the resultant chaos, and only Denis ‘Larl’ Sigitov living for Spirit.
Despite Xtreme’s lead, the game devolved into a buyback war. Waiting for buyback, one teamfight exhausts them, wait again.
Finally, poor positioning from Larl led to the decisive moment, with Xtreme finally exhausting the buybacks and dealing true deaths to the Spirit roster, eliminating the clear favourites for the series.
Ultimately, after losing the early game, Spirit were waiting for the mistake from Xtreme, but it came from their side of the map.
Can Falcons recover without a roster change? Let us know on our Discord server!
For more Dota 2 action, see our interview with Yandex’s watson.
Darragh is an Esports Journalist for Insider Gaming specialising in Counter-Strike. He loves to explore how esports teams work, or why they very often do not.
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