The day started with one of the hottest match of the evening where Fnatic, the current ESL Pro League champions faced Astralis who have been in a good form recently. The last time both the teams faced each other was not very long back where Fnatic won 2-0 in the best of 3 series and later winning on the whole tournament. It was going to be a pretty interesting matchup as both the teams are in their top form and Astralis looked for revenge from the current ESL champions. The series ended with Fnatic winning the series 2-1 (16-9 on train, 16-19 on inferno and 16-12 on overpass).
The first map of the game was train and was picked up by Astralis with them starting on T side of the map and securing the first round with everyone contributing equally. However Fnatic replied back with their aggressive play from the youngster Ludvig ‘Brollan’ Brolin and won consecutive rounds after that and ended the half 10-5 in favor of them. Although the second half started with Fnatic planting the bomb in a 5 on 5 situation but Astralis coming out stronger and securing the round. The rounds went back and fourth after that but with the brilliance from Maikil ‘Golden’ Selim and his total frags of 24 in the first map helped fnatic close out the map 16-9.
The second map was inferno that was picked up by Fnatic and was one of their strongest map picks from the entire map pool and had a streak of 5 wins on the map. The game started with Fnatic easily picking up the pistol round with 3 kills coming from ‘JW’ and starting things well for Fnatic they later on went on winning the gun round and leading the map 5-1. Although, Astralis cameback with some amazing rounds from Emil ‘Magisk’ Reif and actually won the half 9-6. The second half started with an amazing ace from ‘Golden’ from the USP who was actually struggling to get kills in the first half. The first gun round saw something that was quite unexpected from Astralis as they went on to win the duels on the B site and then actually forgot the C4 in the T base that actually cost them the round and later on Fnatic went on to win that round.
Fnatic were on the map point but Nicolai ‘device’ Reedtz had some other plans and pulled out some amazing kills and leading them to 15-15 and going into overtime. The overtime was quite one sided where Astralis won the first half 17-16 and then closed out the map 19-16 taking the series to the third and final map Overpass.
The third map overpass started quickly with Astralis winning the first round with the help of ‘Magisk’ and ‘Xyp9x’ but Fnatic later on replying with a gun round win and taking the scoreline to 8-2. With the brilliance of Robin ‘flusha’ Rönnquist and Ludvig ‘Brollan’ Brolin taking a total of 16 and 14 kills just in the first half they won the half 11-4. The second half started with Astralis giving a top notch pistol round with device taking three quick kills from his glock and winning the round. Astralis went on to win 5 rounds in a row and taking the scoreline to 11-9 and then Fnatic finally realized that it is time to wake up and close the game and with the partnership of ‘flusha’ and ‘JW’ both getting 24 and 22 frags in total they finally secured the map 16-12 closing out the series 2-1.
Fnatic winning the series and giving Freddy ‘Krimz’ Johansson a good birthday present. Fnatic will now be facing Dignitas on Tuesday and also Astralis will be facing Vitality on the same day. The upcoming matches of this tournament will be quite interesting to see and we’ll see how the teams perform and if they make to the major.
