The ESL One Road to Rio had an exciting game this evening as Fnatic the current #1 team in the world faced Vitality in a best of 3 series. Fnatic have not really been in their best of their form lately and have been facing difficulties to win matches since their rank update. Vitality are having a decent tournament and they last defeated Dignitas 2-0 and were hoping for the same result as well. We saw Vitality winning the series 2-1 (16-13 on Dust2, 20-22 on Inferno and 16-11 on Mirage).
The map veto began with Vitality banning train and Fnatic removing Vertigo, Vitality then picked up Dust2 as the first map of the series and Fnatic chose Inferno to be played as the second map and in the end Mirage was left over to be played as the third and final map of the series.
The first round of Dust2 was quite quick and ended in just over 20 seconds with Ludvig ‘Brollan’ Brolin and Maikil ‘Golden’ Selim taking some very quick kills with their USP and starting off well in the first map. Although Vitality replied back with the gun round win and later taking on the scoreline to 7-3 and then we saw ‘shox’ clutching an insane 1v4 with his AWP and adding cherry to the top. Vitality closed the half 12-3 in their favor quite comfortably.
The second half started with Fnatic winning the pistol round and tried to recover the lost rounds of the first half and actually played quite well and took the scoreline to 10-12 until Vitality broke their 7 round streak and then played amazingly by securing the first map 16-13 and moving to Inferno.
The second map was Inferno and it started with Fnatic again winning a pistol round and opening up their scoreboard. Later on we saw Mathieu ‘ZywOo’ Herbaut winning a 1v1 against ‘KRIMZ’ and securing a very important round for his team. The first half ended with Fnatic winning the half 9-6.
The second half saw surprisingly Vitality winning the pistol round with a B site play and securing the round easily. However we saw ‘KRIMZ’ taking 3 kills from just his Five Seven and giving his team an eco round win. Later on we saw how good ‘ZywOo’ is with his AWP on this map and he was just going insane throughout the map and helped his team take the score to 14-11 but Fnatic was not ready to give up on this map so easily and they played well and tied the score 15-15 taking into overtime
The overtime started with Fnatic picking up the first round but Vitality replying back quickly with the next round win and after that it was just rounds going back and forth because both the teams were giving their all in and finally Fnatic won the map 22-20 and wasting the efforts from ‘ZywOo’ who had 48K-24D in the map.
The third and the final map of the series was Mirage and Vitality began with winning the first round with a stellar pistol round and starting the map on a good note. They later on went to give a good performance throughout the half and winning it 9-6 in their favor.
The second half was the same story as well as Vitality again won the pistol round with 3 USP kills coming from ‘RpK’ and taking the scoreline 10-6 in favor of Vitality. Fnatic did try to comeback on this map as well but were denied with the brilliant plays coming from both ‘shox’ and ‘ZywOo’ and then Vitality finally closing out the map 16-11 and winning the series 2-1.
This game saw Vitality upsetting Fnatic in a best of 3 series and winning 2-1 and actually defeating the current #1 team in the world. We will now see Fnatic play against Complexity and Vitality will take on Ence on Wednesday.
