It's crunch time in the second last week of ESL Pro League, as teams will begin scrambling for their EPL playoff berth and a trip to play in São Paulo, Brazil. Even Ninjas in Pyjamas, who sit fairly comfortably in first place of the European league, still have four matches left to play and are not guaranteed a playoff spot just yet. Almost no one is safe.

Fnatic and Team EnVyUs are currently shy of the sixth place cutoff point for the playoffs, sitting in seventh and tenth place respectively, and the two will look to each other to snag some crucial wins. It should get heated between the two rivals in their match in Week 8 of EPL.

It's a historic matchup we're very familiar with as the two teams played each other in 38 maps in 2015 alone, such as during the ESL One Cologne 2015 Major Grand Finals, which Fnatic won 2-0. Nowadays their matchups are less common as they've only faced off 11 times since the start of the year, with Fnatic winning seven of them. However, that was with Fnatic's previous roster.

The Swedish shuffle on Aug. 15 saw Jesper "JW" Wecksell, Robin "flusha" Ronnquist and Lars "KRiMZ" Freddy Johansson leave for GODSENT in exchange for Simon "twist" Eliasson and Jonas "Lekr0" Olofsson. Fnatic rounded out their roster with John "wenton" Eriksson, who stood-in for the team while Olof "olofmeister" Kajbjer Gustafsson was recovering from an injury. Initial assessments of the new Fnatic were not particularly positive.

Having a very hard time imagining how fnatic would not have drawn the short stick here.



GODSENT's roster looks much stronger on paper. — lurppis (@lurppis_) August 15, 2016

Fnatic had decent success in their online showings during EPL, standing with a 10-6 record and notably took 2-0 sets against Virtus.pro and Natus Vincere, but their LAN debut at ESL One New York 2016 was not the strongest showing.

Fnatic lost their opening match against Virtus.pro 16-6 on Cobble, but showed signs of life by defeating OpTic Gaming 16-3 on Train and Astralis 16-9 on Dust 2. However, the Swedes went down as they lost back-to-back matches against Team Liquid, both times on Dust 2, to exit the tournament from the group stage. While it was a disappointing result, it was a bit par for the course for Dennis "dennis" Edman, who did not over hype his team's debut.

"We are still a new team and even though we've made some good online results, we have no pressure to win and dominate already," he said in an interview with theScore esports.

On the other hand, nV will be riding on the momentum from their win at the Gfinity Invitational just over a week ago. Though it was only a four-team tournament, it was a clean run for nV as they took down Epsilon eSports 3-1 in the semis and swept mousesports 3-0. Kenny "kennyS" Schrub and Dan "apEX" Madesclaire being in their vintage form is a big factor to nV's recent peformances.

Fnatic are currently ranked higher than nV in the EPL rankings, but that may very well change by the end of Week 8. The French team have been firing on all cylinders lately, while the Swedes look like they're still finding their comfort zone with the new lineup.