by Reece "SabrewoIf" Dos-Santos
It had been a long time coming for Alliance
but the EU Super team finally hit the pinnacle of their potential and really
hit the ground running with a perfect game over the heavily favoured Najin
White Shield from Korea.
Coming into this game, Najin White Shield
were undefeated in Group D and easily one of the favourites for the whole
tournament considering their complete domination of the Korean playoffs
gauntlet - taking out KT Bullets and the heavily favoured KT Arrows alongside the
Season 3 World Champions SKT T1 K. Alliance showed promise in their first game
against Najin Shield but were unable to convert their early game lead into a
win due to a reluctance to push hard and fast before Shield’s
hyper carry protection comp began to scale into the late game. All the right
components were there in Alliance’s arsenal to take down Najin Shield: strong
laners, tight synergy and the ability to not get out-rotated. Unfortunately, vision control was rather lax and that lead to an eventual loss of map control
and the game.
This time, however, Alliance had come off
the back of a very convincing win over Cloud 9 (which earned Shook a respect ban
from Shield on Rammus) but clearly they did not respect him enough. Shook ran
the map solo queue style, making huge plays and picking up the first three
kills for Alliance and he proceeded to never let go of the stranglehold he had
over Shield and the map. While Alliance destroyed ten towers and
picked up fourteen kills, Najin White Shield were unable to pick up a single kill or
objective, including Dragon and Baron, for themselves. By the end of the game Alliance had amassed a
24k Gold lead and not once had the tide ever shifted in favour of Najin
Shield. This was clearly a victory that was gained through hard consideration
of what went wrong for them the first time, as more
vision was both invested in and controlled (32 vision wards placed by Alliance
compared to 16 by Najin Shield) alongside the fact that Zefa’s Tristana never
had the time or the opportunity to scale up and become relevant in the game.
If this is what Alliance can pull out, it's
clear that they are a team that should not be as overlooked as they were coming
into this tournament. Shook and Wickd have shown that they themselves are now
more than worthy of target bans towards them and should be wary of bans coming
in on both Lee Sin and Irelia, but with this consideration it also frees up the
possibility of Froggen, Tabzz and Nyph having bans less targeted towards them. What
this victory has definitely done is changed the mind-sets of many people:
Alliance is no longer just the Froggen show; it’s a true Alliance, a true super
team of mechanically world class players.
Froggen built this team to challenge and
overcome the best teams in the world, With this flawless victory over Najin
White Shield, his team has done just that and can look forward to the
possibility of doing so again.
