w0nderful powers NAVI to ESL Pro League S23 trophy

NAVI overpowered Aurora in four to take home the ESL Pro League S23 trophy in what ended up being quite a comfortable win in the end.

Aurora failed to get double digits on all three of NAVI's map wins, with their sole win being a tight Anubis that was categorised by clutch after clutch. Wicadia was the hero on Anubis with two massively impactful clutches, while w0nderful looked to have turned the tide with his slightly fortunate, mostly great awareness spray into the smoke to stop the defuse and steal away what should have been an Aurora round.

Despite winning that map, that was a bit of a theme.

NAVI won ten clutches over the four maps, with w0nderful alone being responsible for seven. Seven! Seven clutches in a grand final is absolutely bonkers, and it's a joy to watch w0nderful when he's in this kind of nick. He's quite difficult to pin down as a player, but he was a massive part of NAVI's Major win, and generally he's a very important piece when NAVI do actually rise to the top.

But it's also symptomatic of everything we know about Aurora, and their issues on stage. Many of these situations were extremely winnable (obviously), and they'd probably have stopped the clutch four or five times if the pressure wasn't so high. XANTARES especially; as much as we all enjoy watching him, he's had a terrible grand final, and it's not the first time he's wilted on stage.

This was the w0nderful show, no doubt. He picked up 82 kills, went 12-2 in opening duels, had 21 multikill rounds and seven clutches. That's ZywOo numbers.

He was far and away the best player on Mirage, seemingly popping up wherever was most inconvenient for Aurora in every round. What was remarkable in this series was how much work he got done on the T side - AWPing is traditionally a defence-first role that excels on the CT side, especially on Mirage where you get a lot of room to make plays and fight on long angles, but w0nderful picked up over half of his kills on the T side.

Mirage was the first example of that, as he picked up two clutches and 14 kills on the T side. He was a post plant menace with both the sniper and the rifle, and consistently found massive mid-to-late round impact.

NAVI on the whole had cooler heads than Aurora in the late rounds. The early rounds tended to be quite even, but it was in the 4v4, 3v3, 3v2 situations where NAVI's experience and composure shined.

w0nderful continued his reign of terror on Anubis, but found resistance in the form of MAJ3r, Wicadia and XANTARES, with all three having monstrous moments. Wicadia's clutches proved pivotal, while XANTARES found ways to get Aurora into rounds they shouldn't have been in, as we've come to expect from him. MAJ3R, against all odds, was the most consistent fragger on this map for Aurora, and led from the front as Aurora squeaked away with a 13-11 win having been 8-2 up.

You'll never guess who topped the scoreboard on Nuke.

Seriously, we're getting a bit tired of typing his name out. He was once again the best player in the server, with another important clutch to earn NAVI a fifth T side round (that included a, frankly, vile one tap), and four opening kills. After a tough first half for NAVI, they were completely unbothered on their CT side, only losing a round to a pretty special 1v3 from Wicadia, and w0nderful (oops) and Aleksib both garnering over a kill per round.

Dust 2 wasn't the cleanest map from NAVI - not least R21, where the hero of the story teamkilled and then missed an important shot in a 2v2 for the first time all series - but XANTARES had seemingly lost all semblance of composure and had a horrendous time. He wasn't alone, but he's the talisman, and it's sad to see him go out like that.

Take your pick of the bunch for NAVI in this map - makazze had an excellent map having been relatively quiet in the others (he was by no means bad, he was just competing against w0nderful), b1t superb as he so often is (there was a shot he hit on Nuke that was genuinely jaw-dropping), or, again, w0nderful.

makazze took the HLTV MVP for the event, but it's hard to ignore how absolutely ridiculous w0nderful was in this final. Maybe they wouldn't have been here if it wasn't for makazze, but they'd have struggled a lot more in the final without w0nderful.

NAVI haven't looked like winning a trophy for a long time, but you can't ever rule out B1ad3, or Aleksib, and they've consistently been around the top 10 which is more than we can say about some teams. This was a perfect storm; no Vitality or Falcons, MOUZ and Spirit imploding, and NAVI hitting some form at the same time - but that's not to say it was a fluke either.

MOUZ and Spirit's fragility isn't new, and Falcons suffer from the same thing. There's a real shot for NAVI to become a top two or three team again, and they seem to be up for the challenge.

Congratulations, NAVI!