G2 has announced the benching of Spanish AWPer Álvaro ‘SunPayus’ García. The announcement comes after G2 made the quarter-finals of the IEM Cologne 2026 Major, finishing 5th-8th in the biggest competition of the Counter-Strike calendar.
Soon after, G2 announced the signing of Artem ‘r1nkle’ Moroz. The 21-year-old Ukrainian AWPer was on the Ninjas in Pyjamas bench after the team failed to qualify for the Major.
G2 remove SunPayus; Sign r1nkle
Despite the relatively positive finish to the season, G2 has decided to remove SunPayus with r1nkle taking his place in the new G2 roster.
G2’s run at IEM Cologne saw the team impressively make the playoffs, defeating NAVI to secure a playoff berth and playing out a classic series against Team Spirit in the quarter-finals to narrowly fall out of the competition.
While the season ended relatively positively, G2 spent much of the season far away from a sniff of a trophy, last lifting silverware at BLAST Open London 2025 in September of last year.
G2 have then opted for a gamble, replacing SunPayus with benched 21-year-old NiP AWPer, r1nkle. r1nkle’s aggressive playstyle has proved to be extremely inconsistent in his time at NiP, at times their redemption and at times their doom, costing NiP dearly in important rounds.
G2 will be hoping they can polish a rough diamond, but there is an obvious risk attached to the gambit. If r1nkle cannot sand off his rough edges, G2 may be left wishing they had SunPayus’ reliability back, even if he had a lower ceiling than the talented Ukrainian.
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What does the SunPayus benching tell us about G2?
The SunPayus benching is an enlightening direction for the roster, considering the internal dynamics of the team and its current direction.
We know that Eetu ‘sAw’ Saha had previously worked with SunPayus at ENCE, as had Guy ‘NertZ’ Iluz. Following NertZ’s addition to G2, it had seemed at first that it was a happy reunion for all involved, but it has proven to be a short one.
For SunPayus, on an individual level, that ENCE stay remains the pinnacle of his individual performance level, suffering a severe downturn in Counter-Strike 2 in comparison to his CSGO days.
Nevertheless, G2 had potential reasons to keep him around, partially because of his established relationships with the ENCE cohort, but also because of his voice in-game.
SunPayus could frequently be seen doing a large portion of the mid-round communication for G2’s CT-sides, specifically, and without him, they are losing that voice. SunPayus had also acted as IGL for G2 at IEM Rio, where G2 were missing Nemanja ‘huNter-‘ Kovač.
For G2, it may be that having that strong voice was not in the end what was desired in the roster, with huNter- establishing himself as more in control of comms after the SunPayus benching.
Certainly, r1nkle will prove to be more of a junior partner in the G2 project, with the 21-year-old playing more individually for his own stats rather than commanding G2’s troops.
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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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