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Esports
Can OG CS:GO cap off an incredible freshman year at BLAST Fall Finals?
After forming only at the end of last year, will this latest BLAST tournament deliver a first major victory to OG's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive squad?
Players, fans and analysts alike were shocked when the OG CS:GO roster was announced at the end of last year. OG, formed by Johan 'N0tail' Sundstein, was known as an International winning Dota 2 team – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was their first step out of their comfort zone. We all know that OG was able to form a championship-winning team in Dota2, the question on everyone's mind was if they could do the same in Valve’s other big esport. The competitive scene has been dominated by teams and players that largely haven't changed over the years.
Almost 12 months on from the announcement, OG haven’t won an S-tier competition just yet, but will next week's BLAST Fall Finals be their first?
To understand how likely it is for OG to make a major splash at the Fall Finals, we have to take a look at their current rankings first and, of course, their form.
Currently, OG are ranked the number eight team in the world, seventh if we're only looking at European teams. Five teams that are ranked higher than them (Team Vitality, G2 Esports, Natus Vincere, BIG and Astralis) will also be attending the tournament. Purely looking at the rankings, things look a little tough for the OG Squad, but OG aren't most other Counter-Strike teams and if you’ve seen Against The Odds, you’ll know that OG positively thrive as the underdogs.
They've shown that often if a team is ranked better than them, they perform better. If you need proof, just take a look at the way they qualified for the main event. They beat Natus Vincere in a 2–1 victory and grabbed the higher seed. Coach Casper 'ruggah' Due said: "We seem to perform really well against the best teams, so we don't use too much time thinking about which opponent would be good or bad."
To win against the best, this is the kind of mindset that a professional team needs. It's no good looking only at the rankings, it always depends on which team is ready to show up on the day of the match – and OG seems to do just that against the best.
For OG, the biggest challenge they will have to overcome is Astralis. Coach ruggah recently told us that they haven’t managed to beat the team yet, "however, we haven't played them in a long time and we're a different team than last time we played, so it would be a good challenge for us regardless."
Since Astralis lost against G2 in their own group, there's a chance that both OG and Astralis will face off in the first round. Nevertheless, a victory over Astralis anywhere in the tournament would be a sign of OG making a very deep run.
Building up to the big finals weekend, over the past year OG has concentrated on creating one of the few truly international teams in professional Counter-Strike. In most other teams, players speak their native language in the in-game channels: OG do things differently. All five players come from a different country, so English is the in-game language. Other than tactics, strategy and shooting, this one of the most important factors to succeed for OG, says ruggah: "Synergy and teamwork are very big factors on our road to success. It doesn't matter if we can perfectly execute certain strategies if we don't play the situations that follow with synergy."
After a year of practice and already coming very close to victory intheir IEM New York run, OG will have to show that they can go against the best in Europe in the BLAST Finals. Their form is great and their results have been good, so will this be the first major win for the squad? Stay tuned.
