​ Thanks in large part to TyLoo managing to reach the top 14 in London and securing themselves a spot in Katowice without having to go through the minor system, for only the second time (the first being ESL One Cologne 2015) the Oceanic region is going to be represented by two teams at the Major.





Renegades





​ The Renegades are a side who are no stranger to this stage of the Major; this is their seventh consecutive appearance. The experiences haven’t been too fruitful however, with none of the aforementioned six prior Challengers Stages having led to them progressing. For that feat you must go back to 2015 when SPUNJ was leading the team; there’s a lot of failures that this squad will be looking to set right.





The current Renegades line-up is relatively recently post roster shakeup, involving them dropping Nifty and USTILO for the pairing of Gratisfaction and Liazz who had been building their names back home in Australia.





Gratisfaction, the AWPer for the team, has settled into the squad very nicely. He’s not particularly flashy with the big green, but he does a consistently solid job of getting the kills you’d expect him to. He’s quite passive, particularly on CT, and does a very good job of saving the AWP (an underrated trait).





Liazz, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have slotted in quite as well; while not being outright terrible he’s underwhelmed and regularly finds himself at the bottom of the frag chart. To my eye he seems to have been slotted into a lot of the more supportive spots vacated by USTILO, a role very different to the one he made his name under in Australia. He probably profiles a bit too similarly to jks to be effectively used in this team; they overlap too much.





Veteran squad-member AZR has taken over the leadership since then, and the effects have been interesting. As a positive they've definitely stabilised, levelling out around the 15th to 20th best team in the world spot and being far less regularly upset. That’s a hell of a lot better than the lineup under Nifty towards the end was looking; they were in free fall at that point looking awful at the Major losing to TyLoo, Gambit and almost to Space Soldiers with a stand-in, and prior to that losing to a Japanese team at the Asia Minor.





The downside seems to be that they’ve lost some of their upset potential that the old line-up had. Nifty was an incredibly streaky player, but even jkaem (who is still on the squad) hasn’t shown as high a peak level of performance since the switch. The old Renegades had LAN series wins over fnatic and FaZe; I don’t think the current lineup has the potential to peak as high despite looking an overall better team.





I don’t think this’ll be the Major to see them break their streak of failing to progress to the next stage, although I do think it’ll be close. I expect they’ll handle themselves pretty well against the Chinese and CIS teams (other than AVANGAR), but after that I’m struggling to see where they’ll pick their wins up. I think it will probably come down right to the last match, but at the end of next week I expect to see a Chad Burchill breaking down a series slightly bummed out.





Challengers Stage Prediction: 2-3





Grayhound​





​ At this point Grayhound are best known for their player Dick Stacy and his eye-roll inducing saga surrounding his “Dickers”. It’s a shame, because they’re a promising squad and are probably being overlooked.





After a while of the Australian scene being tightly contested between four teams (ORDER, Tainted Minds and Chiefs being the other three), Grayhound have managed to sprint ahead of the rest of the pack and firmly establish themselves as the top team in the domestic Oceanic scene. They’ve looked competitive with the mid-range European teams at the LANs they’ve managed to make and were impressive at their Minor looking comfortably better than all the Asian teams they came up against (including ViCi who would go on to beat North three maps consecutively).





The team has a solid trio of fraggers in Mongolian erkast, AWPer Sterling and IGL dexter, and they usually combine and play off one another pretty well. I think they’ll do particularly well against the more aggressive PUG style teams like Vega Squadron, Winstrike and TyLoo due to their regular matches against Asian teams at Pacific qualifiers and tournaments.





That all said though, I don’t expect them to make it through this stage. I do think they’ll play a few of the bigger teams closer than a lot of people are expecting though, especially if a team comes in unprepared and they can get them on Overpass or Dust2.





Challengers Stage Prediction: 1-3





Other Major Previews:

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(Image credit: ESL)​