Astralis annihilate Team Spirit and MOUZ crumble AGAIN - ESL Pro League S23

We would like to issue a formal apology to Astralis and HooXi for suggesting there was no world in which they would beat Team Spirit.

We'd also like to apologise to phzy for suggesting donk was the best player ever to touch the game and forgetting about him.

Astralis didn't just beat Team Spirit today, they absolutely destroyed them. HooXi had Spirit chasing shadows, and phzy had them chasing heaven. We're so flabbergasted we don't really know what to say. We've been pretty high on Astralis and have had massive respect for the way HooXi has made this team more than the sum of its parts in a way few IGLs have been able to for Astralis recently, but this is a showing that shakes the very foundations and makes you wonder just how good this team can be.

phzy just straight up farmed a top five team while donk went negative. It's incredible. Take the nameplate off and you'd think it was ZywOo. He had a rifle ace to end the first half of Ancient for crying out loud. He was everywhere.

It's nowhere near good enough for Spirit, of course, but this felt like some S-tier prep work from HooXi who seemed to know what Spirit were doing well before even they did.

Though perhaps that could be mitigated if Spirit didn't have magixx as their IGL. Just a thought.

Which idiot wrote 'MOUZ in pole position' in the headline in yesterday's preview?

coughs

MOUZ' stage woes reared their ugly head yet again as a team of rookies held their nerve to edge out what should be a team of hardened stage veterans by now, as FUT just about converted a massive lead on the final map to complete a historic victory.

This feels like a watershed moment for MOUZ, who surely now must make a change or two instead of repeating the same old failings time and time again. You can forgive not being able to beat Vitality in however many tries, or losing to teams around the same level, but when you lose to a team who have never played on stage before and who are multiple places behind you in the rankings - regardless of how dangerous they have looked - it's hard to excuse.

For FUT, though, this feels monumental. Some players and teams just level up on stage from the moment they're on it. Their rise has been astronomical and there appears to be no ceiling on this team. Man for man they can match anyone, and they play a repeatable brand of Counter-Strike that does not rely on gimmicks or some sort of unreliable lunacy a la Bad News Eagles.

This is a proof of concept win for this team as a genuine top five contender. An on-stage BO3 win over a current top five team who were the favourites in your first ever stage appearance as a young team is extraordinary, and just shows how special this team can be.

Please don't peter out.

FUT are legit, and MOUZ are legit chokers.

Speaking of a young player leveling up, makazze dropped a nuclear performance to push NAVI into the top four and set up a much-anticipated against their former academy team, FUT.

makazze was brought in to replace jL but his progress has not been linear, and we've been waiting a long time for him to truly be the star player NAVI need, but he's showing signs of being capable of shouldering that burden.

While The MongolZ did look a little less secure in themselves without their esteemed coach behind them, they were in touching distance of taking Ancient before makazze stepped in to deny them. In a map that went all 24 rounds, makazze had huge impact in several key moments - not least a naughty 4k to defend the A site after his anchor was found out of position.

After that, he decided The MongolZ weren't going to be allowed to play on Mirage, and 24 rounds was far too much, as he slaughtered the MongolZ' offense with 17 kills in the first half, and another six in the remaining five rounds. He finished the map 23-7 and the series with 43 kills, and truthfully, The MongolZ never stood a chance on Mirage.

Look, we don't want to be mean. We really don't.

But we're not sure either Aurora or Legacy truly deserved to win in this quarter-final.

Legacy kicked off map one by taking a 4-0 lead, before losing 13 rounds in a row (!) on their own map pick, in what was a pretty embarrassing start to proceedings, really. woxic was, as he so often is on Dust 2, a menace, and even MAJ3R was picking up kills. This was cooked before it even really began.

Aurora raced into a 6-0 lead on the T side of Overpass straight after, making that 19 rounds in a row, and it was all over.

Unless, somehow, they then lost the next 12 in a row to go 12-6 down and lose their own map pick, which they of course did. Six rounds on T side Overpass is already a great haul, and with a chance to rack up more it's a near unloseable position. It's somewhere around 3% of games are won from 0-6 down, on Overpass, on the CT side, in regulation, on CS2.

That's a lot of qualifiers, but you get the point.

Having been so totally in control for the whole game, Aurora let it slip massively and let Legacy into a third map. Fortunately for the Turks, Legacy seemed to run out of steam and ideas, and their triple threat of Wicadia, XANTARES and, uh, MAJ3R dominated the server and spared their blushes.