Photo by Yicun Liu/Riot Games
Xi Lai Gaming had a disappointing start to its Champions Shanghai campaign, losing 2-0 to EMEA’s Karmine Corp and winning just nine rounds across both maps. Entering the event as one of four home favorites, the Shanghai crowd is still awaiting a VCT China team to pick up a win.
A concerted effort to adopt a double-Duelist pairing of Waylay and Yoru was seen in the series, with Duelist players NoMan and Rarga making up the two-man “mosquito comp” pairing that was first popularized by DRX at Champions Paris last year.
Head coach hvoya opened up on why the team opted to use that comp, as well as what went wrong in the match.
“The reason why we use this comp is because we try to suit everyone’s comfort role,” he told Ult Orb, mentioning NoMan and Rarga’s past experiences on Waylay and Yoru, respectively. “Obviously, it didn’t go well today.”
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hvoya said that XLG’s struggles against KC were more internal than external, and that the team is already focused on fixing those problems ahead of its next match.
“I think we lost to ourselves,” he said. “I [wouldn’t] say it’s confidence issues, it’s like some other issues that we faced today. Some ego plays, it just happened today, and this is something that we’re gonna work [on] before the next match, and I think the next match is gonna be much better for us.”
“I would say today we lost trust in each other in-game,” he said. “Our synergy was really, really bad. You could see we were throwing some rounds, like Sunset 5v2 retake when we have like most of the utility to retake. It was just an unloseable round, but we still managed to lose.”
On Sunset, XLG found itself in an eight-round hole and was never able to claw out of it. Abyss was a similar story, as the match started with eight straight round losses, followed by a recovery that was more encouraging than Sunset but still resulted in a loss.
“The most key thing we can change is that we have to fix our comms when we lose some plays. We should start believing in each other more for the next match.”
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After the loss, Xi Lai Gaming’s next opponent is none other than Masters Santiago winners Nongshim RedForce. A win over Nongshim, who has never played against a Chinese team in VCT play, won’t come easy, but the side is confident.
“Yes, absolutely, we can win,” NoMan said, responding to Bruno Almeida of Japão FC E-Sports. “As hvoya said, we lost to ourselves today. We’ll focus less on the opponent, but also, fortunately, we’ve practiced against them quite a lot throughout the season, so we know what we’re up against for sure.”
XLG and Nongshim will meet in their win-or-go-home matchup on October 1 at 5 a.m. PST/8 a.m. EST, or 8 p.m. local time.
