ESL One Cologne: Opening Matches Recap
The first four matches of ESL’s main Counter-Strike: Global Offensive event have concluded, and there’s one standout result.
Three out of the four matches in Group A were dominated by the overwhelming favorites. Astralis, Cloud9, and mousesports had no trouble defeating their opponents. In fact, none of the teams they faced were able to score more than eight rounds in total against them. Now, these winning teams are just two matches away from qualifying for the playoffs on July 5 at the Lanxess Arena.
Initially, all eyes were on mousesports. With the addition of former Virtus Pro player snax, the European roster played their debut match against Gambit Gaming. In sharp contrast to snax’s struggles with his Polish countrymen in Virtus Pro, the 24-year-old looked in top form during his debut.
The most shocking result came from G2 Esports’ victory over Na`Vi. Just one month ago, Na`Vi won the fifth season of StarSeries i-League and the CS:GO Asia Championship. However, it was the newly formed G2 roster that emerged victorious in a close match, narrowly avoiding overtime.
This result is quite significant. Prior to ESL One Cologne, the G2 roster had only played together at the ECS Season 5 championship, where they struggled and were eliminated in second-to-last place. However, in Cologne, the team’s experienced players, Edouard “SmithZz” Dubourdeaux and Richard “shox” Papillon, stepped up, outperforming Na`Vi’s Egor “flamie” Vasilyev and Denis “electronic” Sharipov.
With this loss, Na`Vi is now one map away from being eliminated from one of the year’s biggest CS:GO events.
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