Team Liquid are the champions of ESL Pro League Season 11 North America. They faced a surprisingly lackluster Evil Geniuses side and won two quick maps to secure their first trophy since IEM Chicago back in July 2019.
ESL Pro League Season 11 just can’t deliver on grand finals
After the mild disappointment that was the ESL Pro League Season 11 Europe final, we hoped for a little more out of the North American final. There’s no true despair without hope and the two finalists made sure that despair was all we got. Well, mostly EG, Liquid just did what they were supposed to.
Due to entering the final from the upper bracket, Team Liquid needed two maps to win the match despite it being a Bo5.
The veto was enough to guess proceedings would not go in EG’s favor. Liquid went with Dust2 as the opener, which proved a wise decision. Evil Geniuses almost made it a game with a good run of rounds in the second half but 10-13 was as close as they got in this 11-16 defeat.
Vertigo, which EG picked themselves, was an entirely different story. Why they went with this map so early in the picking process is a mystery. Whatever plan Peter “stanislaw” Jarguz had in mind, it didn’t pan out. AWPer Tsvetelin “CeRq” Dimitrov had a nightmare of a series and struggled particularly on Vertigo where he recorded a whopping six kills. Naturally, EG struggled as a whole without one of its stars’ contribution and lost 16-9, and the match with it.
Team Liquid have been one of the best Vertigo teams around since the map’s inclusion in competitive play and while CeRq’s horrendous showing definitely contributed to Evil Geniuses’ fast demise, perhaps stanislaw should have reconsidered the map selection.
Because of the coronavirus the ESL Pro League was split into two regions – Europe and North America. While this is still a trophy and it has technically put an end to TL’s drought, they know best that there is a huge asterisk to it in the absence of almost all of the world’s top ten teams. We’ll have to see whether they’ll be able to transfer that swagger to international LANs once the pandemic passes.
