Recently, the loser’s bracket match between Team Whales and CERBERUS Esports concluded with a victory for “The Divine Dog”. In the Spring 2023 season, CES has not performed well, and the players’ form has been quite inconsistent. Even in their match against TW, they could not finish the game early and had to drag it to the 5th game before finally defeating “The Whale”.
Notably, in the decisive game, there was a moment when the TW players pushed right to the Nexus of CES. However, they were just one basic attack short, and yet TW could not execute it. After successfully defending, CES pushed straight to the TW Nexus and ended the game, leaving many VCS fans disappointed for Glory and his team. This result also made Coach JackieWind the first VCS coach to experience 2 “near-death” situations within just 6 months. The first time was during the match against Top Esports in the group stage of World Championship 2022 on October 16, 2022.
CES’s “narrow escape” also caught the attention of the international LoL audience. On the forum Reddit,a discussion post about the match attracted a lot of comments from viewers. Many believe that instead of saying CES was just lucky, they should blame the TW players for being too unfocused and not calculating carefully for the push. Notably, the name that received the most criticism was Killerqueen with the champion Lee Sin.
– “Imagine this is the final qualification match for MSI, they might be haunted by this for their entire careers”
– “I’ve seen this situation before at Worlds 2022, but it was two different teams back then”
– “I feel like they didn’t communicate enough in the final situation. Malphite and Jinx had a moment where they auto-attacked Nautilus. Clearly, they could have ignored that and focused on the turret.”
– “Just one more hit. Imagine how they feel regretting that one hit on the minion didn’t help them take down the minion, but if they switched to the turret, they could have won.”
One comment highlighted: “You can see a huge mistake from Lee Sin. He respawned and moved about half the map, then turned to the Dragon pit. I agree that his teammates were very low health at that time, but they could still fight, and he changed direction. But that also means he was trying to say ‘The whole team is aware of the issue now. I will add a few stats for us.’ Ultimately, communication is really important.”
In reality, CES’s victory was a combination of luck, resilience, and the focus of the players. No one can say that if Killerqueen had continued to move toward CES’s Nexus, TW would have won. But undoubtedly, this defeat is a valuable lesson for the entire TW team on their upcoming journey.