JiJieHao spring surprise on Spirit on wild first day at EWC

In a day packed with wall-to-wall action, it was Spirit who suffered the most ignominious defeat.

Perhaps most troubling for Spirit is they lost even with donk showing up, which is usually enough to beat anyone, even established top 10 teams. JiJieHao were able to take Mirage 13-10 despite donk dropping over a kill per round, which should set off alarm bells for anyone of a Spirit persuasion.

The narrative has always been that if donk plays well, Spirit win, and if he doesn't, they are impotent; but today even that was not enough to drag the lifeless corpses of sh1ro, zont1x and tN1R over the line. Harsh, but honestly, they were deadweight in this game.

JiJieHao were well-drilled and impressive without being outstanding, simply giving Spirit enough room to hang themselves. Spirit's T sides continue to cough and splutter to a halt in the mid-round, and they look bereft of confidence and ideas.

Alright, it's just a best of one. But best of threes are simply three best of ones.

We think Confucius said that.

There was loads and loads of other games, so we're going to have to be quite brief here so we don't take up your entire evening.

None of the other 'big' teams fell at the first hurdle, with Falcons and Vitality looking incredibly dominant. A stunning pistol ace from qw1nk1 did little to deter a ruthless Falcons from running over Dust 2, while Vitality swatted 100 Thieves aside like they weren't even there.

When apEX is dropping 120 ADR on your bonce, you've been smacked.

FaZe were pushed all the way by BetBoom in what is, to be fair, a relatively even match-up. We continue to be impressed by JBOEN, and it's always nice to see jcobbb play well. We're rooting for the guy. We have no real concerns over BetBoom, but losing FL4MUS does really just stop us caring too much about them.

MOUZ were mostly untroubled by Lynn Vision, never truly looking like losing the game, but it wasn't totally one-sided either. It was even going into Lynn Vision's T side, and on Dust 2 that's a good spot to be in, but you always felt like the Chinese side would crumble and they did. It felt like they were constantly on eco, and getting farmed by PR and xelex on opposite sides of the map.

FURIA made hard work of a big lead, but ultimately came out unscathed against Wildcard. molodoy isn't quite back to his brilliant best, but we saw glimpses with two gorgeous multkill rounds on the A side with the AWP.

NAVI took care of business against 3DMAX, and MIBR came up short against Astralis. B8 beat PARIVISION, predictably in 24 rounds, while NIP get absolutely smacked by Legacy.

We were excited about this NIP project at one point. What was wrong with us? Legacy had four separate players on exactly 16 kills, which is obviously more than any NIP player got.

G2 edged past a resilient M80 in one of the more enjoyable games of the day. G2 are always cinema. It was new boy r1nkle - whom seemingly nobody thought was a good fit for this team, bar G2 - who saved their bacon with a kill per round in this one. He was an absolute brick wall on the CT side as G2 somehow still only got six CT rounds.

The MongolZ still look decent despite everything, as they swept aside magic, and FUT got it over the line against TYLOO.

That just leaves Aurora vs BIG, the other major talking point of the day.

The new Aurora team was a bit of an underwhelming one after all of the hype and rumours, but we still expected a bit more than this. Again, caveat with not much time together and it being a best of one, but early signs of this team are not great.

This team is obviously built around Wicadia and XANTARES, with Jimpphat just needing to be an upgrade on soulfly and kyxsan on MAJ3R - but soulfly was an extremely underrated player, and MAJ3R a competent IGL who spoke the mother tongue of the star players. This team needs time, but we fail to see where the massive upgrade is even after that time. At best, we think this will end up being a small upgrade in six months.

Anyway, they lost to a BIG team who have been on the come-up a little bit. It's not time to panic, but we wouldn't be too excited if we were Aurora fans either. JDC and faveN helped BIG to 13 rounds, bullying Jimpphat in the process. We're a little worried for Aurora.

You can track all of tomorrow's games here, as we head into tomorrow's BO3s.