Today’s Team Liquid line-up is one of the best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams in the world, on the basis of their numerous victories over top opponents and consistently high placings over the year. No North American team in CS:GO has ever been as routinely excellent, beaten top European sides with such frequency and put themselves in position to legitimately be considered a favourite to win not just any big tournament title but even the major, that intimidatingly elusive and hallowed ground occupied by many of the game’s greatest ever teams and players.

There have been many teams worse, and in some cases much worse, than Team Liquid who have won big international championships and tasted the glory of becoming a champion at the highest level. It is easy to feel pity for the plight of Liquid’s players as they’ve toiled and seen their efforts bear such healthy fruit, only for it to wither on the vine right before it ripened. But don’t. Nothing could be better for them.

When the pain has been processed and the lessons learned, today’s bitter grapes of defeat can become tomorrow’s sweet and plentiful wine of success. Team Liquid have been spared the confusion of being good enough to win sometimes but unable to secure a legacy of continued strength. This is a squad that understands how to defeat most opponents and climb the competitive ladder to its highest rungs.

Debate, both internal and external, does not spiral maddeningly around who is to blame for their lack of trophies and who could be replaced with the man who will prove to be the missing piece. Their campaigns have shown the quality and strengths of each man among the quintet such that it is clear they have what they need to win any competition, slay any opponent and chase greatness. The questions now are of mindset, of understanding and of bravery.

Such lessons are battles to be won both individually and collectively, much as the fights within a round in the game operate on both levels. Each has his own task and path before him and only he can walk it.

The powerful and the capable

Twistzz at ESL One New York unleashed the deep potential so glaringly apparent and yet tantalising fleeting in years gone by. Here was a player better than any from North America to have ever competed in CS:GO, delivering an outstanding individual performance worthy of true reverence and more than a mere MVP trophy. But will that player put in an appearance in upcoming competitions? Talent is the gift of potential and the curse of having no map on how to navigate such a treacherous but treasure-laden trajectory.

How does one lead by example in the game, carrying the load and taking on the responsibility of out-matching the opposing team’s stars while at the same time being the youngest in the team and the least equipped to lead men? What place does such an individual carve out for himself? Another curse of talent in esports games is that it manifests in the young as fully as the old. There is no wait for the strengths of a man’s body to develop until a player can express his ability in esports. 14 years old? Just turned 15? Here comes the fickle goddess of latent ability to sing her seductive song and awaken a force within a teenager that could blow away even the strongest opponent.

How does one learn to harness such a power? Even when talent has been harnessed, how do you balance the fine art of exerting your ability to win and yet not dominate your team-mates to the extent they are diminished by your excellence but rather inspired?

Too cool to care

NAF looked for all to see like the best North American player when he joined Team Liquid and, had Renegades performed to a higher degree, likely could have shown as much in the last months of last year too. Here was a player who had been forged by the failures of yesteryear. An erratic but massively unreliable talent in his early days, so young it was forgiven but also not much expected of him.

Even after carrying OpTic to a big international title at ELEAGUE Season 2, delaying Astralis’ ascension to the status of world number ones by a few weeks, NAF was still the player left out of the scavening which surrounded the line-up the following year when it was clear the team was dead in the water, results-wise, and the players were ready to move on. Left to gamble on Renegades, rather than waste away in a lesser NA team, NAF not just seized his chance in the Australian side but rapidly emerged as the true star player they had always lacked for and one seemingly every North American side needed.

As an outsider, NAF’s mental edge seemed to be that he legitimately didn’t care what people thought of him. That can be a powerful ally, as can be observed by the sheer number of people who misleadingly suggest they share such a mentality, all the while ignoring the obvious fact that the need to repeatedly tell others you don’t care betrays a clear desire to have them believe you don’t care and thus suggests you in fact care deeply about their perception of you. For NAF, one could believe he legitimately ignored those who said he wasn’t disciplined enough in his game, couldn’t be the carrying force of a top side and would never again reach the heights of that fateful ELEAGUE final.

That mentality carried him to the point that his skillset developed alongside it into one of the most formiddable in the game, legitimately comparable to talents like device and NiKo in his in-game prowess. Here was a player who became so irritated by his team giving up a monster lead over Astralis, the game’s undisputed best team, on inferno at the major that he took matters into his own mitts and broke the Danes himself. What refreshing decisiveness from a North American star!

Here was not a player content to simply be respected as a top player and occasionally upset the best European teams. Here was someone who legitimately seemed to think he belonged atop the podium and over such Herculian foes.

Where was he in the final of ESL One New York, though? An under-rated element of a Best-of-five series which goes the distance of seeing all five maps played is that there are very few players in history who can sustain their best form over all five maps. This is the kind of test of endurance and adaptation that shows the difference between a hot game and a great player.

NAF seemed mildly annoyed to have lost. At times in the match he seemed to fight himself, throwing away deaths out of frustration and veering in the opposite direction of playing unusually passively. This was not a player who didn’t care. This was no rock who could not be shaken by even the fiercest storm. So who is NAF? Is he the most complete North American player, a star to match any from Europe’s finest?

Class dismissed

EliGE was often touted as a talent in his early days, but took some years to discover how to express his skill with consistency. His approach to team-work was mildly strained by a tendency to allow frustration to cause him to shut off and forgo the necessary but potentially painful risk of connecting and sharing in the whole of defeat.

Certainly this proved less obnoxious than the player who expresses his frustration by screaming at his team-mates and chastising them, but in some senses this underlying resentment’s quiet nature was also more difficult to root out and address. After all, he wasn’t saying anything unproductive. It’s just that sometimes the problem was that he wasn’t saying anything.

With a skillset which spreads across all of the weapons a star rifler should strive to master, EliGE has often stood as the defacto best player in North America thanks to his fabulous statistics and his rock solid baseline. Here was a player you could build a world class team upon. No wonder his addition to s1mple’s superlative star-power sent Team Liquid to an unexpected major final and saw them remain relevant even after the Ukrainian’s departure.

When Twistzz filled s1mple’s shoes in 2017 EliGE was again ready to be a powerful and consistent force alongside the streaky star-in-the-making and Team Liquid rode them to two finals and nearly three straight offline victories over the SK Gaming squad which had been the best in the world only months prior.

EliGE has polished his game and addressed the concerns surrounding his attitude, but one battle still remains: the will to win. Much is made, often too much, of players’ attitudes in interviews and their demeanour on stage. Everyone wants to believe they can intuit which UFC fighter showed weakness at a weigh-in face-off or who seems more confident from their barking at the press conference. Any long-time fight fan knows there is not a strong correlation between those factors and who gets their hand raised at the end of a bout.

Nonetheless, EliGE has never been a player willing to commit to winning and being the best. Where that used to manifest as a yet-to-be-developed skillset and later as a stand-offish team personality, now it remains lurking as a latent desire to wait and see. Not to look silly by daring to believe, privately or publicly, that you are the best. Not can be, but are. The courage to tell an opponent he won’t beat your best today and see him realise you mean it.

Team Liquid has the skill level, the star players and the roles set to beat anyone, but do they have the emotional leader? EliGE is one of their veteran players at this point in time and must face the harsh reality that his team’s inability to close out big matches and cross the finish line in some small part, at the very least, eminates from or surrounds him.

The intelligent in esports games are often haunted by the rational view of themselves as good but not perfect. As one of the best but capable of making mistakes and losing. These are the players who second-guess themselves, hoping to figure out the correct answer the second time around rather than trusting their instinct and being in the moment of battle. This is the application of a strength of character which can help a player improve when reflecting back on his play outside of the context of the game, but misapplied in the process of playing the match.

An opponent is broken down, his mistakes analysed and the best ways to attack him identified. That is an element of being a top competitor, but building up your team-mates to be at their best is another. It is not enough to simply play and hope for the best. Great players go out and take the title. They don’t play well and hope for it to be handed to them, imagining they deserve such accolades due to having checked all the boxes. In fact, one of my favourite periods of a great champion’s career is when he has begun to fall off, has been surpassed and by all rights should not win again, as he did at his career peak.

So often, this is when he not only continues to claim the spoils of victory over more hungry and even able challengers, but sometimes wins most of his titles, having perfected the efficiency of confident and decisive play under pressure, even if his raw abilities are not what they once were. Few teams in history could beat the FNATIC line-up of the latter part of 2014, yet they won no major that year. The very same line-up in 2015 had been beaten, scarred and even flustered – as their battles with TSM can attest whether they choose to admit it or not – only to rally back to win more championships and majors than anyone else and crown their era.

Does EliGE have that arrogance of excellence? Is he infatuated with victory to the extent he forgets the possibility of defeat? Will he put himself and his pride on the line for his legacy and his team-mates?

Teaching the locals

TACO has stood on the stage of majors as part of the last team standing twice in his career. He has hoisted more trophies and been a part of more great victories than even many great players deserve. As the world marvelled over the impossibly efficient and masterful play of star coldzera, so in time they came to appreciate the little guy, metaphorically, who was there to aid and amplify the SK star’s efforts. Now those team-mates and times have gone.

The new challenge for TACO is of a nature he could not be prepared for. Players like fer and coldzera are possessed of a drive to win that does not need coaxing out of them. FalleN and fnx had such veteran experience they gave the lessons, verbally or by example, and did not need help maturing as competitors. Team Liquid needs all of the aforementioned. A strong case could be made that this Team Liquid squad is more talented than the SK line-up which won back-to-back majors, but in terms of grit and mental toughness they could not be further behind.

TACO’s task is to learn the natures of these new team-mates, hailing from a different culture and himself now the one attempting to teach, where previously he was the eager and admirable student. Such lessons will not be passed along easily, coming from someone without the talent of a Twistzz or the reverence commanded by a FalleN. TACO must find a way to aid and amplify those qualities in his team-mates as he helped push coldzera’s game to the heights of being unstoppable.

Blow up or it gets blown up

If there is one man who might end up actively removed from Team Liquid it’s the man who has sacrificed the most: nitr0. Once the shining star of the line-up, admittedly many moons and player changes ago, the former entry fragger is now the AWPer and in-game leader of Team Liquid. In both respects, he is serviceable and at times better than he perhaps should be. We have even seen, as ESL One New York showed us, moments in which his play has mirrored the leadership styles of gla1ve (of Astralis) and chrisJ (of mouz) in using his entry strengths, shared with those names, to lead his team towards a decisive win and open up a hole through which the stars can punch their way to victory.

The puppet master is the one who gets fired when the puppets can’t perform, though. Each of the young stars has their own failing and room for essential growth, but the world looks at the team and demands trophies from its obvious wealth of talent. nitr0 is the man who must bear that burden and find a way to develop further still and draw more out of his team-mates.

The chosen team

Cloud9’s line-ups accomplished collectively over their different iterations, but they were never going to be the best team in Counter-Strike. OpTic soared high in late 2016 but they could not even survive one big failure. North American CS:GO history is littered with teams that had fire-power or compelling figures and went on exciting runs but without the ability to make excellence a habit and beating Europeans such a formality that it was no longer a matter of being an underdog and upsetting a favourite.

Team Liquid is the squad who in some of those senses has already surpassed all who came before them from the continent. Here is a team with a bevvy of stars that can be put alongside any of Europe’s best. This is a squad who plays grind-out, tactical Counter-Strike, where so many North American teams of the past rode the erratic but unreliable path of “scrimmy” gimmick plays. This is the team who are supposed to become great, but only they can continue along that path further.

The terror of transformation

In Indian religious mythology characters sometimes ask eager students if they are willing to be hurt when inquired of for knowledge. The message, all too clear to see for anyone who has fought to improve, is that truth and realisation carry the price of pain in seeing what must be sacrificed and burned away. Improvement is not the safe path of comfort and cheer. To improve is to prune and to cut away that which is in the way of advancement.

You might say you want to win, but do you still if it means the individual who emerges out of the other side of the process which could yield such results is unrecognisable from the one who went into it? Legendary five time NFL champion quarter-back Tom Brady says if you want to beat him then you better sacrifice your life because he has sacrificed his.

Each defeat Team Liquid has faced in a semi-final or a final has been another time they have turned away from paying the price of improvement. On a few occasions, they have been beaten by a better team. On just as many they have helped beat themselves, metaphorically holding their own arms behind their backs while the opponent wails away at their mid-section until they fall.

Don’t pity or bemoan Team Liquid’s struggles. If they begin to unravel the secrets of a strong mental frame and chop away the insecurities and concerns which hold them back, they will win more than just the one trophy which has thusfar eluded them. Astralis were once laughing stocks other top players and teams told me they loved to face. “It doesn’t even matter if they’re better than us right now”, these greats would tell me and they were right. I don’t hear much laughing any more.

The same players and teams who told me to stop over-rating the potential of the Astralis core and demanding that device become the super-star player in a team of abundant talents have suddenly joined me in the choir. That’s how powerful our ability to change the narratives which surround us are. They depend upon us, rather than being forced upon us. Once we realise that, we can begin the work of changing who we are, so our destiny’s course corrects accordingly. When you are heading in the right direction you will end up where you need to be.

For Team Liquid, better they keep losing now, rather than occasionally win or be handed a gift by an opponent stumbling. In such circumstances they might mistake such victory for the end goal. Once their flaws are addressed such that they cannot hold them back as much as their strengths drive them forwards, then you will see a Team Liquid squad that without any player changes can win any and every tournament. That’s the team I want to watch and I won’t shed a single tear for the team standing in their way.