Cover-Credits:
Team Spirit will have to make its way through the entirety of the Lower Brackets of the ESL One Stockholm Major 2022 to stand a chance of winning the tournament after suffering a 2-0 loss to Tundra Esports. The International 10 champions barely made it into the playoffs after surviving the tiebreakers yesterday, but showed that it was still a team to be feared, by pushing Tundra Esports to the limit in its upper bracket match.
Tundra will make its way to the next round of the Upper Brackets where it will face the winner of the Thunder Awaken vs BetBoom Team matchup on May 18 (Wednesday).
Tundra Esports dominates Game 1, despite Spirit’s late surge
Tundra had a good start to the series with an outdraft of Team Spirit, allowing them to dominate the laning phase and completely shut down Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk’s Ursa. So Team Spirit were in the backfoot for almost the entirety of the game with Tundra forcing down towers and Roshan-takes at will.
Neta "33" Shapira was the standout player for Tundra, putting in a phenomenal shift as Lycan and enabled his other two cores to go wild. The team seemed nay-unstoppable, but an incredible teamfight using buybacks from the reigning TI champions around the 27-minute mark opened up the opportunity for a comeback.
However, Tundra remained calm and composed to secure the win in the first game.
Yatoro strikes back
The second game of the series was far more even, as Yatoro came back with a vengeance on his Phantom Assassin. Despite his team not having a good time, Yatoro had a good start to the laning phase and some smart mid-game movements keeping Tundra Esports on its toes and bought enough time for his other two cores to catch up on the farm.
His only threat, 33’s Aghanim’s Scepter Doom was countered with four Linken’s Spheres on Team Spirit, which enabled Yatoro to carry his team to victory and evened out the series.
Tundra has the last laugh
Tundra Esports managed to reset and make a few adjustments to its lineup, allowing it to snowball even harder against the Spirit lineup and push its opponent’s backs to the wall. They choked out Spirit, by maintaining an overwhelming amount of map control and just used its superior late-game lineup and net worth advantage to secure the series victory.
Following the win, 33 said that his team has had “boring games” so far in this tournament and that this game against Team Spirit was its first true test. “So far in this tournament, we’ve had kind of boring games. We’ve kind of had pretty smooth sailing so far, and we haven’t really been tested, but we knew it was going to come,” he said.
“It was just the group stage, you have seven teams, four of them were going to go to the upper bracket but nobody was ever feeling like they had to give it their all, both for us and our opposing teams. So we kind of expected the playoffs to be harder, especially Spirit. Spirit was just chilling over there in Group B with no risk of elimination, living the good life. So we knew that when they get to the playoffs they are going to bring their best strategies. So we expected this,” he added.
Team Spirit will face South American representative, beastcoast, in its lower bracket elimination game which is scheduled to take place on May 17th (Tuesday).
