Let’s get down to the wire! So after a poor run in 2019 Worlds where Team Liquid wasn’t even able to come out of groups, Doublelift told the coaches and management that he wanted to play with the same roster in 2020. He was the only one who wanted to keep their jungler Jake “Xmithie” Kevin Puchero in the team. Team Liquid had a very weak mid-jungle duo through the matches of the group stage in 2019 Worlds. Doublelift felt like putting the entirety of blame on Jake wasn’t justified. However, everyone in Team Liquid wanted to get a new jungler and that’s when Mads “Broxah” Brock-Pederson made it into the team as the starting jungler.
In the starting weeks of 2020 split, Doublelift wasn’t performing well. Due to his lack of motivation & poor performance, Team Liquid decided to bench Doublelift.
In his latest vlog, Doublelift agreed on the fact that there was a lack of motivation from his side and he even took the blame for that. He also accepted that he had a very terrible attitude towards the game and his teammates. He mentioned that he apologized many times to his teammates and publicly as well.
In the vlog, Doublelift also talked about how no feedback was given to him after he got benched, and the justification he got for being benched was hard to swallow. He even talked about how supportive Steve (co-owner of Team Liquid) and Broxah were. So when after a while, Doublelift was given the chance to join the starting lineup once again but he was clearly told to not make any calls during the game, and to just feed information to the team. He even said that he tried his level best to be cooperative with the team. “I was really scared of losing my job once again or getting benched”, Doublelift added.
So after all this, Steve told Doublelift that he might get traded with a different team and asked him about which teams he would like to get traded to. So Doublelift gave Steve a short list of teams he would like to get traded to and TSM was his top priority. Steve really cared about Doublelift and so he did what Doublelift asked for.
There were accusations that Doublelift was moving to TSM for his girlfriend Leena Xu, but Doublelift denied them all. In the vlog, he mentioned that he wanted to be traded to a good team and that he would have not joined teams like CLG or Team Dignitas even if Leena was working for them. He also said that he did not sabotage his reputations and performance intentionally. Doublelift also mentioned that Bjergsen and Biofrost are his good friends and an org like TSM is super hyped.
