The six teams directly seeded by the ESL:
Denmark This team might be the overall favourite team, as they got all the stars from the Ravens team together with former MYM player Playmate and the rather unknown Flaskehals. Due to the rules, Playmate and Flaskehals have to play in each game, since all the other players are from the same clan.
Germany The German team has to face almost the same problem. Levent is not allow to play due to his Turkish passport and KuroKy, regarding to a statement from fragster, has already left the team. That means MaNu and H4nn1 have to play each game of the tournament.
Sweden Made of former SK and the swedish part of former mouz and some other swedish top-players. Loda recently created a new team, TLT, but as he stated, the team did not practise much until now.
Ukraine The Ukraine team is full of top players which have shown a good performance lately. If they will be able to find a good chemistry, a top 3 placement is possible.
Russia Russia was probably the best team in the old VP/Rush3d days, and also this year the Russian team 1dota has shown a great performance during the DTS Cup. The team seems fully motivated and any placement below top 3 would be a disappointment.
Norway It is hard to rate this team, because there havn't been any games of this nation team. According to NozG, it is not fully known who will play for Norway.
The six teams coming from the qualification:
Croatia With Minitito as leader, they might do well, but besides him they dont have many known players and they will have a hard time against the big nations.
Bulgaria Bulgaria has a collection of players from ReT, but besides that they there are not top-players and like Croatia they will have a hard time
Romania Consisting mostly of TEG and Next players they have a decent team and should be able to do well. They have shown a good performance in the qualification round and in some pratice games.
Slovakia One of the teams, where the favourite teams will have a tough time. They have practised a lot lately and which consists of many SGC players, which have shown some surprising good performance.
Czech Republic This is one of the teams which are hard to rate. Consisting of known players from eSuba and SGC. Their strentgh will depend on how they chime together.
Poland Kicking out the nation team from Slovenia, the team from Poland consists of players from LowHP aka PGS.
We at GosuGamers got statements from some players who are fighting in this championship. Check them out!
(UtherX) Bulgaria has some great DotA players and we finally were able to show our quality by successfully qualifying for the Main Round in the DotA ENC 2009. We are really proud of our achievement and we'll try to play even better in the groupstage. It will be hard to face teams such as Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Romania, etc., but we have faith in our ability. We wish good luck to all participants in the main round and may the best team win.
(Tulex) To be honest I dont think we would be able to reach the absolute top against allstar teams of Germany, Russia or Denmark, but as you already saw in a game against Israel we have a potential! Our goal would be therefore lets say 8th place and higher. We arent much prepared since most of players would rather go train with their own teams instead of nations team(Especially we SGC bastards)
(SuRpR1se) The main round will probably be the moment of truth. There are many good teams in the tournament and we are aware of the difficulty of our upcoming match. We haven't been training a lot, we have played just three matches so far which we have hopefully won. We would like to use some unusual strategy and take our enemies by surprise. We hope for more nice matches with a happy ending.
(CroXo) Hello, I´m CroXo, team manager of the Croatian national team. Our chance to reach the finals are not very high, cause there are a lot of national teams with players from great clans. Our goal is to reach the third place in the group stage to ensure the main round in the next season. We didn´t train very often, but we trained a little bit before the ENC has started. We are going to prepare very well for the mainround , cause we know that we have to fight against big teams.
We wish every team good luck and a lot of fun :=)
(Dendi) i think we going to be top1-2-3
(Loda) We're really looking forward for this season of ENC, mostly caus we are a new team and we need to get some high lvl games played! I believe that the first few games will decide if we will own this season or suck =)
(blowyourbrain) We are rdy for 100% and aiming only top 1. we are playing with this team for the first time on such a tournament and we definitely will do anything to become the best.
(CupofTea) Okay everybody, here we are! The Polish nation amongst the best of the world. We are ready like neve before to conquer ESL Nations Cup! With such personalities, as EG.Fanat1c, Marian, Yrk, BeMyValentine and other representatives of, LowHP and UF Gaming we are ready to place the polish flag as high as possible.
On May 27th, ENC will know the teams which will face each other. The games will start on June, 1st and end on July, 5th. We will be covering the Main round with news and replays, don't miss it!
Links
European Nations Championship - Source
