Na’Vi risk getting eliminated from ESL Pro League S16

Just several days ago, it was hard to not be optimistic for Natus Vincere. They were smashing teams left and right and their roster looked impressive. But in the last two days, the team suffered two defeats and is now just one loss away from elimination, despite starting group A of ESL Pro League S16 with two victories.

This CS:GO tournament has turned into a nightmare for them. The result is less important than the morale of the team ahead of the European RMRs for IEM Rio Major. If Na’Vi play the same way in that qualification tournament as they did against Endpoint and Team Vitality, they might lose not just the Legend status tickets but the Major too.

Na’Vi’s Losses

The Ukrainian team’s first two matches of the tournament were against Team Spirit and Fnatic. Despite a few mistakes that were committed, Na’Vi looked great and won both times: 2-0 against Spirit and 2-1 against Fnatic.

Then came the match against Endpoint, which should have been a formality. Except it was the exact opposite. On the first map of the match, Ancient, the score at halftime was 7-8 in favor of Endpoint. And on the second half of the map, Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev and his crew did not manage to win a single round!

Viktor “sdy” Orudzhev had a really poor performance that practically buried his team. But some of his other teammates were just as lost as he was. Valery “b1t” Vakhovskiy, who usually plays impeccable CS, lost a lot of duels and finished with a K-D score of -6.

On the second map, b1t played even worse and had a score of -13. Meanwhile, sdy’s performance remained the same and it was not good at all: -10. S1mple probably felt like he was playing on his own, just like several years ago.

The second match lost by Na’Vi was against Vitality. This was a really hard match for both teams but in the end, Vitality proved to be the stronger side. The score was 16-10 on Inferno, 14-16 on Mirage, and 12-16 on Overpass. Once again, Na’Vi had two maps on which at least one player had a poor performance.

On Mirage, it was Denis “electroNic” Sharipov, whose -10 K-D score was not good enough to secure the win. On Overpass, it was sdy again, who only got seven frags and died 19 times.

Na’Vi’s next match

Na’Vi’s next match will be against Ninjas in Pyjamas. This should be an easy battle against a team that lost three of their first four matches at this tournament. But it’s hard to have any confidence in Na’Vi at this point.

Header: ESL