After the recent removal of Niqua as Alliance's offlane player, TI3-champion AdmiralBulldog now returns to the team and position where it all started.
An old dog returns to his former kennel as Henrik "AdmiralBulldog" Ahnberg once again barks in the offlane of Alliance. He was part of the team since formation until late 2014 where he vanished from the official matches, stating he was taking a break from competitive Dota. Since then he briefly played carry for Team Tinker before focusing on his streaming.
After a longer lean period, Alliance shaped up again after adding 7cknMad and Niqua earlier this year. It seemed as if the former success team was finally on the right path back to redemption. But much goes on under the surface in a team and Jonathan "Loda" Berg, being the face of the team, claims that the team struggled with synergy. "Adapting, swapping lanes, and other elements which are fundamental to a Tier 1 team didn’t work out so well for us," Loda states in a blog post. He mentions a clash of play-styles amongst the players as well lacking communication causing several in-game issues. "It takes a lot of experience, and sometimes not even that is enough; sometimes you just need to have personalities that fit with each other better."
He furthermore states that he considers Niqua a friend and that they could not have made it this far without him. The team considered removing him before StarLadder but wanted to see how it went on LAN since it can be a team strengthening experience. However during the event, Alliance still suffered the same kind of problems and the decision was to let Niqua go. The blog post mostly focus on the departure of Niqua rather than the re-addition of AdmiralBulldog but presumable the communication and synergy with Bulldog will be better because of his lengthy history with the team.
Bulldog will be performing with Alliance at ESL ASUS Play it Cool marathon later today and has already played one official match with Alliance post StarLadder 12. The team went up against Ninjas in Pyjamas in a match for survival in Dota Pit League, season 3. Unfortunately for Alliance, NiP won the match 2-1 and Alliance were eliminated.
With The International invites and qualifiers just around the corner, it is a bit worrisome when a team changes players. Loda however finishes the blog post by saying "This is the final lineup. This is Alliance.?"
Source: theAlliance.gg
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