On March 9th, G2 made an announcement that they were going to make roster changes to their lineup. The lineup before the change was: Nathan “NBK” Schmitt, Kenny “kennyS” Schrub, Alexandre “bodyy” Pianaro, Dan “apEX” Madesclaire, and Richard “shox” Papillon. It was assumed that shox was going to step down from the active lineup due to his wrist injury and once that was over everything would be back to normal. Instead the injury has become a trial period. The first lineup will get shox’s recovery time as a trial period to prove that they are the better lineup. If not, then the G2 roster will go with the shox. This time there is no French Revolution, this time there is only the G2 Thunderdome.

To understand why the change needed to happen, we have to go back to 2016. G2 was considered the second tier team to EnVyUs. After slowly grinding up and making critical changes to the roster, they were able to eclipse EnVyUs. EnVyUs on the other hand slowly deteriorated as the team could no longer buy into Vincent “Happy” Cervoni’s system and he as a leader was unwilling to change. So the two main actors of the last French shuffle, shox and NBK created a new roster.

On paper, it was a super team. It included the aforementioned: NBK, kennyS, bodyy, apEX, and shox. They had two potential superstar players in KennyS and shox, whose styles didn’t overlap. KennyS was the AWPer and shox was the lurker. On top of that you had apEX was a great entry-fragger and teamplayer. Bodyy and NBK filled out the roles and were both great at doing so. It should have been a slam dunk, the ushering in of a new age. It never was as the team was never able to find consistency in how they wanted to play. If they were on form they could win a tournament, but they were a dark horse team rather than world contender.

In 2018, the team managed to make the ELeague Boston Major playoffs, but their loss to Cloud 9 was terrible. Soon after the team went to two more tournaments at Starladder i-League StarSeries Season 4 and IEM World Championship. Starladder Kiev was the same as the Major, good group stage and then disappeared from the playoffs. IEM WC was just a bad tournament in general and makes me think the team had already broken by then.

In the past, before contracts and big money came in, the usual thing that happened was a massive shuffle. This time around, there were multiple factors shifting as G2 had a complicated scenario on their hands. On the one hand, shox is their franchise player. A superstar level talent that has proven year on year that he can rise back to the top of competitive CS:GO. On the other hand, the rest of the team was in revolt. The structure of the team was a mess as well as Edouard “SmithZz” Dubourdeaux didn’t want to coach anymore and wanted to go back into the game. On top of that shox had an impending surgery for his wrists and so no one knew how long the recovery would take.

According to the video, Carlos “ocelote” Rodrigues Santiago said, “Near the end, shox’s frustration in relation to the team was increasing.” Shox started to propose radical ideas as to what to do to rebuild the team and achieve the lofty goals that the shuffle in early 2017 had failed to produce. However, ocelote had to consider the other side and in the video says, “We believe that the rest of the team deserves a chance to prove themselves and deserves what to know what may happen.”

The rift was irreconcilable. The team wanted NBK to try in-game leading and shox wasn’t up for it. At the same time, SmithZz has stepped down from coaching and is starting to play again, so in all likelihood the new shox lineup will include SmithZz. As for other candidates, the remaining free agent French players of note are: Kevin “Ex6TenZ’ Droolans, David “devoduvek” Dobrosavljevic, Francois “AmaNEk” Delauney, and Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut. Or some of the members of EnVyUs could be potential candidates as well. I’d imagine a roster including some of these names is likely part of shox’s pitch.

As for the rest of G2, apEX has made it clear on twitter that “Shox will never come back to this line up. He may still play for G2 in the future though.” What the rest of the team has done is first get their fifth, which will be Oscar “mixwell” Canellas. He has already started taking French lessons so that he can play better with the rest of the team. As for leadership, NBK has taken on that mantle once again, but this time it is a bit different. In previous rosters when he tried to take leadership, there was always an easy answer if things failed for him. Most famously he let Happy take it back in EnVyUS. This time there is no failsafe as there are no other classical in-game leaders on this team.

Given the current scenario, ocelote has created the French thunderdome. He is giving time for Shox to prepare for surgery and recover. In the meantime, the G2 lineup will now have to prove that they can make this work. If they don’t get the results necessary, then G2 will go the way of shox. As for the timeline, we have to think of the Majors. The next one is on September. A new lineup generally need some time to get together and be good, usually around three months. It is March now, so given the timeframe the current G2 roster with NBK, apEX, bodyy, kennyS, and mixwell will probably have three months to whenever shox’s wrist recovers to prove that they are the better team. Welcome to the G2 Thunderdome, two lineups enter, only one lineup stays on.