Get Back Up — The Journey Continues
22 September — by League Analyst
The dust has settled after a long and exciting year of LEC. Rogue emerged as summer champions, a tremendous achievement for the players and staff involved. They lifted the trophy for the first time in the history of the organization.
For Fnatic, the LEC journey ended in the semi-finals, but the year is far from over. The team will represent Europe as the third seed from the LEC in the World Championship.
Before we head there, I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at the semifinals. What went wrong for Fnatic, and what needs to be improved before Worlds starts?
With momentum behind them, many people actually favored Fnatic going into the semi-finals. And they were able to take an early lead in the series, mainly because Humanoid was able to get ahead of the curve on his Sylas, a pick that had a huge impact in their earlier playoff games as well.
It was in game two where the cracks began to show. Sylas was removed in the ban phase, and instead we got two front to back style compositions, something that Rogue has been notoriously good at playing over the years.
The thing with classic front to back gameplay is that it relies heavily on team coordination. The second the formation breaks, it all falls apart. It means that you must work as a team and position yourselves in a way that allows your carries to hit, and your frontline to zone.
Below we have two screenshots, showing the game breaking fights from game two and three respectively.
What is interesting abut the two instances is that they are quite similar. Both times, it was Fnatic who attempted a play, and both times, they found themselves in a numerical disadvantage after Rogue collapsed on them. I would like to draw your attention to how tightly positioned Rouge are as a team in these two freeze-frames. They embrace the death ball philosophy and respond instantly when their backline is under threat.
Meanwhile, Fnatic appear to be in disarray. They fail at the fundamentals; tracking teleport timers, keeping formation and knowing/respecting their own limits. In multiple scenarios during the series, they tried to force plays despite not having the setup required to do so. To me, that is a sign of overconfidence. A “we outplay this” kind of mindset. In the end, it just looks sloppy and impatient.
Teamwork and macro made the difference in this series. But it has to be noted that some individual errors caused problems as well. The most visible being how extremely aggressive Hyli plays the enchanters. Instead of focusing on the formation that I keep harping on about, he seems to be searching for errors to punish, which has resulted in some very awkward situations.
Resolving these issues will be crucial if Fnatic is to make a deep run at Worlds. The mechanical skill is clearly there and the team showed some very good signs as they rampaged through the lower bracket.
The 29th of September is the date we will get to see the squad on the rift again, make sure to be there!
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