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In a surprising turn of events, one of the strongest teams worldwide, Team Liquid, has become the first team to be eliminated from the DreamLeague Season 20. Despite a middling showing at Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) Division II, Liquid’s lack of strength was unexpected in the event as it just registered three wins after 12 games at the end of the third day of group stage 1. In a post-match interview with Aydin "iNSaNiA" Sarkohi after the elimination, he expressed his remorse for the poor performance, stating that they would work hard to find their form again before the Bali Major 2023. Furthermore, iNSaNiA described Team Liquid's typical process of recovering from such disappointing results.
iNSaNiA eyes comeback at Bali after major DreamLeague S20 setback
As the weakest team in Group A of DreamLeague Season 20 after having finished the last season as the runner-up not too long back, Liquid's captain iNSaNiA apologized to the fans for what he called an "embarrassing" performance.
“I mean honestly, I would like to apologize to all our fans who are watching and have watched all of our games. I think it’s been quite embarrassing to play and I am sure all the people watching at home have felt pretty bad too.”
Although Liquid might already have qualified for The International 12, it will not take these results lightly and will look for a way to fix these issues before the Bali Major takes place.
“So, I think we are going to try our hardest to figure out ourselves, try to find form again, and get back into shape as this was obviously a harsh wakeup call. So, I don’t think there’s going to be much relaxing coming up in the upcoming days. It’s going to be a lot of focus, practice to you know, come to Bali and be the best Team Liquid that we can be.”
iNSaNiA revealed that as part of their comeback, they were going to start with the basics before focusing on the problems they are facing on a broader scale in terms of both drafts and gameplay.
“Because we get everyone on bootcamp tomorrow, so starting tomorrow, we will have everyone here. We are gonna start properly scrimming, playing a lot of Dota, try to figure out what’s good and what’s bad because I think if you look at our drafts, you can tell they are all over the place. We are trying to fix gameplay problems with different picks and it does not really work because our gameplay is just not good enough.
I think just try to find out some sort of cohesiveness and some consistency. Narrowing stuff down, figuring out matchups - if they do x, we do y and just have some sort of idea moving forward. This is probably the first step in terms of drafts and gameplay, usually we try to think from the start of the game - from the laning phase and then you go forward every step of the way, try to figure out every step so start from the beginning.”
While Liquid is confirmed to have been eliminated from the DreamLeague Season 20, it still has one series remaining against TSM on 14th June 2023.
