Opinion: Spirit's inaction and lack of imagination is wasting donk

Team Spirit have the best player ever to touch the game and their lack of imagination, decision paralysis and inaction is going to ruin him.

There’s absolutely no reason that two years into the donk project we should be seeing zont1x, magixx as IGL and a flailing tN1R in this team. None whatsoever. Spirit sold kyousuke for this, for crying out loud.

I understand that kyousuke and donk play the same roles, but… you could have at least tried? Imagine what karrigan would do if he had kyousuke and donk at the same time. Would he be trying to sell one of them?

The chopper line-up was perhaps the most maligned but it was the most successful version of this team. chopper, for whatever faults you think he has, won a Major with this team. He won Katowice with this team. Since then, Spirit have replaced their IGL who apparently was too simple with his style, too inexperienced, too one-dimensional, and replaced him with a player who is even more inexperienced and seems to get even less out of his players.

That’s not even a dig at magixx. He’s hamstrung by a coach who wants near-total control and a second star who misses the toilet bowl during “tech pauses”, because Spirit have made consistently poor decisions.

Their decision making has gotten so bad that this off-season they just decided not to make one whatsoever. With the top spot up for grabs once more now Vitality have proven to be fallible, this was a prime opportunity to seize the throne. Vitality made no moves. FURIA made no moves. Falcons, obviously, made no moves. You were behind them, naturally, and they stood still. You had a golden opportunity.

And you did nothing.

When chopper left they brought back some old faces who had already been deemed not good enough, and the only new players who have brought into the fold have been misused or flopped, depending on your point of view. This time, they avoided that conversation by just not signing anyone.

Are they aware that there are more than 10 players in the world?

To ‘rectify’ this issue, they seemingly have taken their big money signing tN1R (who, if I’m being generous to them, is likely the reason they’ve cheaped out so hard on everyone else) and put him in the worst roles imaginable and now have magixx taking some of his spots, the last few rotator ones, according to magixx himself. Have they gone mental? This team is slowly but surely getting worse and worse over time.

We learnt that tN1R can be effective, and all it took was hally not being there for a while. Spirit, in their infinite wisdom, decide to just bring back hally immediately and tank his gameplay. I don’t want to rag too much on the coach, because he’s just come back from a pretty bad illness - but if anything that makes it more crazy that he was immediately put back in.

hally seems to have a vice grip on this team and massive respect from the players, but from the outside in he seems to be holding the team back. tN1R, sh1ro, donk should be a world class trio, but instead it’s one and a half men.

You can pick any number of holes in their decision making. The coach is a problem. zont1x coming back was a painful lack of imagination - he wasn’t really good enough the first time around. tN1R has been hit and miss, mostly miss, though looked far better with a different coach who was quickly pushed back. And now, knowing all of that, with a genuine shot at number one while donk is still willing to put up with your nonsense, you relegate tN1R to have magixx as more of a star?

That’s your plan?

I know I’m using a lot of question marks here, but quite frankly, there are no reasonable answers.

donk must be wondering why the hell he’s still here. He saw kyousuke go to Falcons and get to play with the greatest IGL ever to touch the game along with some of the best players in the world, while he looks back and sees a stuffed toy doing more than his actual coach does.

He’s the best player ever to play the game and he’s being held back by Spirit’s ludicrous decision making. Maybe it’s a good thing for the scene, because donk on a real team could quite quickly make this a Phil Taylor, Bayern Munich in Germany, Tiger Woods situation, but seeing the poor kid having to fight to stay alive in a series against MOUZ breaks my heart.

Russia as a region is blessed with remarkable talent, and even though so much has slipped through the cracks into Europe, there are more than enough gifted players in the region to make a team better than this one. The average Twitter user could come up with one.

Spirit are utterly wasting the best talent to ever touch the game through their inaction, and it’s as frustrating for us to watch as it must be for him. He has to be looking for an out at some point, unless things pick up. He can’t spend his career with his hand tied to zont1x. He just can’t. Something has to give, and it has to give quickly.