One last chance for Astralis

Rarely has a CS:GO team faltered as Astralis have in the open qualifiers for IEM Rio Major. Ahead of these qualifiers, everyone was convinced that the Danish organization would easily win the first of the four open qualifiers and prove to the organizers of the event that asking them to go through it at all was a mistake.

But, as we now know, Astralis failed three consecutive times to finish in the top four and now they’re one defeat away from a disaster.

Despite all the other positive results they got recently, this failure would almost certainly trigger an immediate roster change. Because if you can’t consistently beat teams that are barely 50th-100th globally, how are you going to win against the likes of Natus Vincere?

The task ahead

Astralis started the fourth open qualifier for IEM Rio Major with a victory in the Round of 64 against Budapest Five. But here’s the problem: the final score was 16-12 and the map that was played is supposed to be one of Astralis’ best.

Several years ago, Astralis used to get huge win streaks on this map and look completely unbeatable. Now they struggled to defeat an opponent that’s ranked 173rd globally! This is absolutely insane. Given the rank difference (Astralis are currently 4th), the fans expected to see a one-sided match. But that was not the case at all.

In the previous open qualifiers, Astralis lost against a lot of relatively unknown opponents that looked to have appeared out of nowhere. These teams probably have less than a tenth of Astralis’ experience and training facilities. But they still won somehow.

Watching Astralis play in these open qualifiers has been similar to watching Goliat get defeated by David multiple times. Everyone is still in shock over this.

To make matters worse, Astralis will play in the Round of 32 of the fourth open qualifier against the same team that defeated them in the Round of 32 of the third open qualifier: Los Kogutos. Hopefully, this time Astralis will ban Ancient and not give their opponents the chance to destroy them again.

The result of the first match was 16-8 and Astralis seemed to be completely unaware that Ancient was Los Kogutos’ strongest map. They obviously didn’t ban it and the result was spectacular.

If you want to watch the rematch, which may be Astralis’ worst result of the last five years, you can do that from 18:00 CEST today, August 27. For the sake of spectacle and Astralis’ future, let’s hope that the Danes will win.

Header: Astralis