For ESL One Cologne, the LANXESS arena is always loaded to the gunwales

Once more, Cologne hosted the stage for six great days of Counter-Strike. We were able to witness a great run to the finals by the home crowd favorite, the end of an impressive undefeated streak and the resurgence of an old part of the community, just to name a few.

Here are 4 things to take away from ESL One Cologne 2018.

#1: Na’Vi reach the top tier

s1mple has all the gold right now

Obviously, we have to start with the champions. Natus Vincere was able to use this tournament to solidify their place at the highest echelon of CS:GO teams in the current era.

The CIS side was able to make their dominance known almost throughout the whole tournament. After a little hiccup in the first best-of-one vs. G2 Esports, they started to dominate their competition with a highlight win vs. Danish side Astralis, who had just celebrated being undefeated for 2 months prior to the match against Na’Vi.

Especially electronic stepped up big time in the last few months while finding the best overall performance of his Na’Vi career in Cologne. His evolution on the team shows how important being a cohesive unit and self-confidence as well as confidence deployed by team mates into one’s abilities are. He has finally become the player Na’Vi was looking to sign from FlipSid3.

It looks like Zeus and electronic just needed some time to get comfortable with each other but now, Zeus and the team know where and how to utilise electronic to get the most out of him.

In general, the last tournaments and especially this one show why Zeus consistently finds himself in the discussion about the best IGLs in CS:GO right now.

Additionally to finding a fitting role for electronic, he has shown to be able to constantly put his star player s1mple into positions where he can succeed.

For example, Zeus has received a lot of flak for not providing s1mple with the weapons he needs in order to could carry eco-rounds especially (the hero-AK, for instance). He most certainly had his reasons to call these rounds the way he did, but lately, he has shown to have adapted and switched things up — and now, s1mple regularly gets the most resources of anyone in the team.

#2: BIG’s incredible performance

In Germany, they call something like this a “Sommermärchen”

Sometimes, you can find some indicators for the fact that a team has a great tournament run in them if the pieces fall in place — with BIG, however, you had none of them. Only being the one lineup containing German players spoke for them before the tournament started.

Since the PGL Major last year, we haven’t really seen BIG perform on the bigger stages of CS:GO; heck, they mostly weren’t even qualified to play there — and we all know about the bug exploit discussions surrounding their performances at the aforementioned Major.

This time around, however, especially the German players tabseN and nex came into the groove for this event in the fourth largest city in Germany and straight fired BIG into the final.

Additionally, it was legendary IGL gob b who just came short of leading BIG to the heights he and the legendary mouz lineup of the late 00’s were able to achieve — which is insane, when you think about it.

Similarly to what happened to the Renegades after IEM Sydney, a lot of eyes will be on the German based team in the next weeks and months and it will be interesting to see if they will be able to stick around in the higher ranks of the CS:GO team rankings.

#3: FaZe Clan’s problems just won’t go away

In the semi-finals vs. BIG, FaZe had another Groundhog Day

With the Intel Grand Slam on the line; with Astralis being eliminated just prior and with one of the biggest underdogs in a long time waiting for them in the semi-finals, FaZe couldn’t really have asked to be in a better position on Saturday — a few hours later, however, disenchantment was the order of the night.

I talked about it already after the IEM Sydney Grand Final where FaZe swept Astralis and I think it needs to be revisited: FaZe desperately needs (to at least think about) a sports psychologist.

No idea what particular thing or things break down in situations like these where FaZe are the big-time favorites and they just can’t seem to get it done, but something clearly seems to stop working when they find themselves in these situations.

The best-of-three was also a great display of one of FaZe’s problems: they don’t really have anything to fall back on when their shots aren’t hitting. A team like FaZe should never look that lost vs. a team like BIG.

Nevertheless, the team has an even more glaring issue to deal with: finding a permanent fifth player to complete their lineup.

Will it be cromen? According to NiKo who was interviewed by HLTV, cromen doesn’t really fit the job description the team has determined to search a player for.

After his performance in Cologne and, to be frank, his performances ever since he joined FaZe as a stand-in, however, not keeping him around could be tough to explain.

The Norwegian player will remain in the lineup for the ELEAGUE Premier, but afterwards, who knows? One thing is for sure, if he stays or if he leaves, his stock has risen massively in the last few weeks.

#4: mibr — trouble in paradise?

Soon, this picture could be outdated..

Given all of the hype created by the mibr reveal and all of the potential and talent available to the lineup, this result must be disappointing for everyone involved to say the least.

When a team like BIG gets into the final, whether they have been home crowd favorites or not, all of the current tier 2 and tier 3 teams also attending the tournament need to ask themselves why it wasn’t them who could exploit the slip ups of the top teams — and mibr should be one of those teams; especially because they faced BIG in an elimination series.

So, if things don’t work out as planned rather quickly, teams are fast to think about making line-up changes to achieve better results — and mibr seems to be no different in this case.

Now, if you think that they are trying to figure out how make moves in order to get the lineup back to consist of five Brazilians, you seem to be.. wrong!

Just a few hours ago, reports came out that the team is thinking about replacing boltz with tarik from C9 and that there seems to be a rift between FalleN and coldzera which could lead to the latter wanting to move to Team Liquid in order to reunite with TACO.

Before more concrete stuff will come out about the latter report, I will stick to thoughts about replacing boltz — and, well, boltz has definitely been quite underwhelming in the last few months. Ever since the s1mple and flamie discussion, boltz has seemed to find himself on the capapult seat anyway, so this doesn’t really come as a surprise.

Whatever the case may be, the team seems to be a bit short of domestic bliss, especially if both reports turn out to be accurate. It will be interesting to see how the organisation deals with all of that in the next few weeks and months.

If you want to hear more about these topics as well as the ESL One Cologne 2018 in general, stay tuned for tomorrow’s episode of the Tuesday Morning Esports Talk — now also on Spotify!

pictures courtesy of HLTV, ESL and mibr