Philippine CS: GO Team Bows Out From the E-Frag World Championship Asian Qualifiers
After two matches, the Philippine national Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) team gets eliminated from the Asian leg of the E-Frag World Championships after being unable to win all of their outings, ending up with a 1-1 record in Group D.
Indonesia: The Test of Faith
With Indonesia winning against Nepal on Dust 2 with a 16-4 scoreline, the Philippine team needed to win all of their matches in order to proceed to the Winners’ Group.
Before even the game started, the Philippine team needed to deal with an invisible enemy that is out of their reach: Slow Internet connections.
Just as the first pistol round was about to commence, Juren “Neruj” Aniero dropped from the server while the rest of the players started to have undesirable amounts of ping. Due to the unstable connections, there was a 45-minute delay and the tournament organizers considered to give Indonesia a default win. However, Neruj arrived just as the grace period was about to expire and the hotly-contested match between the Philippines and Indonesia started quickly.
With the Indonesians playing on the Counter-Terrorist side of Mirage, they displayed a very superb performance with a “buddy setup”, which involved putting two players on a site and one player in the middle of the map in order to ensure as much map control as possible.
There was simply no room for the Philippine team on their Terrorist side to breathe as their rushes and fakes were stopped cold by their opponents. Finally, on the 11th round, team captain Shane “z3r02” Wong got an entry frag with his AWP and simply dismantled the A site defense with the rest of his teammates in order to put their first round on the board..
Despite losing that round, the Indonesians were able to stabilize once again in the succeeding round to end the first half in their favor with a score of 14-1.
The Philippine team knew that they had no room for error on the pistol round of the second half as they opted to go for a retake strategy on the A site. It worked well for them, making it 14-2. However, on the following round, a Tec9+armor rush by the Indonesians on the B site brought them to match point and then it was all over in the succeeding round.
The Indonesians go to the Winners’ Group with a 16-2 scoreline to face China, Vietnam and Kyrgyzstan.
Nepal: Salvaging Philippine Pride
With one match to play for the night, the Philippine team decided to give it their all on Overpass against the Nepalese side.
Starting on the CT side, the Philippines took the first three rounds of the half while the Nepales threatened to break their momentum by taking the first gun round on the 4th. However, z3r02 and his mates took the next nine rounds in a quick manner to make it 12-1 on the defensive side of the map.
As they changed sides, the Philippines took the pistol as well as the succeeding anti-eco rounds to make it 15-3. Then again, the Nepalese team took a round, but it only delayed the inevitable as z3r02 and his comrades ended the match in the next round to make it 16-4.
Aftermath
In a quick statement on Facebook, z3r02 mentioned that while the Indonesians had a wonderful game to the point that they could have still lost the match even if they had better ping, the team could have shown a better performance on the server.
They also dedicated their final match against Nepal to the Philippine CS: GO community, where they have shown a wonderful performance.
As it stands, the Philippines are now eliminated from the E-Frag World Championships, with Indonesia taking a 2-0 score and Nepal losing all of their games.
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