MOUZ survive by the skin of their teeth as Spirit breeze through

MOUZ needed triple OT on Nuke just to stay alive against 3DMAX.

While they were relatively untroubled on the final map, it took a marathon on the second to even get there after the Frenchmen took the first.

torzsi bailed MOUZ out with a superb showing on Nuke that was absolutely mandatory, with the two new players struggling to really impact the game at times. PR was much better on Nuke, but was pretty awful on Dust 2 while xelex was fine without really impacting the game - until his map-winning clutch on Nuke.

MOUZ had already thrown a 5v2 situation on map point, and so that clutch must have felt like an oasis in a desert.

Summer Fruits flavour one.

3DMAX had pushed MOUZ to the limit, and as is so common, seemed to run out of steam after that. Underdogs usually get one shot to topple a Goliath, but miss it and you get punished.

PR, whom we mentioned as struggling, got stronger on each map and was absolutely electric on Inferno. He seemed to win every single important duel and opened up the bombsites time and time again as MOUZ ruthlessly pursued and executed 3DMAX's defenders. It was a brutal reminder of where these two teams are at after a brief wobble from MOUZ, and a real statement map at a time when they needed it.

We asked in the preview for Liquid just to compete with Spirit for us to have hope, and... they didn't really deliver.

Look, they weren't awful, but clearly massively outclassed. Spirit racked up 17 T rounds over the two maps, and donk finished on over a 2 K/D. As we predicted, one team has donk and the other doesn't and that's going to be the difference maker.

Not exactly Confucius-esque, admittedly.

The silver lining for Liquid is that Jorko did not look out of place and looked genuinely very good in his first LAN game for Liquid - on Dust 2 he was the sole reason the game didn't end in total humiliation, the lone rebel against an army. He was quieter on Anubis, but this was just donk flexing his muscles and crushing Liquid between his bicep and his forearm.

Liquid seem better than their old selves, and Jorko looks like an upgrade on ultimate, but there's a long way to being better than Spirit.