SKT winning MSI was a surprise to nobody, but how much can we read into G2's performance? Is the gap between Korea and the rest of the world growing or shrinking? Does it even matter?
Former England international Gary Lineker once said of football “[it] is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.” Replace “Germany” with “SKT”, swap out a few of the numbers and he could have easily been talking about League of Legends. As fans we want to believe our team or our region has a better chance of winning next time around but whether it’s 3-0 or 3-1, SKT always wins.
So SKT is the best team in the world? Alright. See you next week.
Well, it’s bit more complicated than that. Like many people, I went into the MSI grand final expecting another disappointingly easy 3-0 win for the world champions. Even after game one, in which G2 actually held a lead for quite a long time, I thought that was as good as it was going to get. They tried their best and made SKT work hard, but now it was all but over. Another plucky underdog that gave SKT one good game but ultimately fell way short. Anyway, after such a poor first game from him, surely Faker couldn’t be kept quiet for a whole series, could he?
Well, no. But in game two Perkz was the better player. In fact, Faker really didn’t live up to billing at all during the final. Yes, Perkz got more jungle help in most of the games but the fact remains that he simply had a better series than the God of mid lane. You could even argue he had a better tournament overall. Peanut was SKT’s best player at this tournament, for my money, but even he was outplayed by Trick on occasion. G2 were able to go blow-for-blow with SKT in lane a lot of the time and often came out of the early stages ahead. But what makes SKT a truly great team is that they can win from behind. G2 should be proud of the fact that they put the Korean powerhouse in several difficult spots and prouder still that they managed to actually take a game from them. In the end, SKT proved that they are still gods, but G2 showed us all that gods can bleed.
But people always want to know about The Gap. Is it closing? Is it opening? Has it turned purple and sprouted a silvery monobrow? Are Korean teams three times better than European teams or 3.5 times? How far behind them is North America? Who really knows whether a Chinese team will win Worlds or capitulate in the group stage?
The thing is, international competition is currently very rare. We have two tournaments a year to go on, not including IEM, which hasn’t really counted for a while now. The Gap is only measured twice a year and is largely arbitrary. How do we weigh a 3-0 where every game comes down to the wire against a 3-2 reverse-sweep where every game is a one-sided thrashing? We know Korea is the best, but by how much?
I posit that it doesn’t really matter. We know that SKT is the best team in the world. How close you were in second doesn’t really matter when everybody else is chasing the same team. What matters is how well G2 does next time they face SKT. G2 has been the best team in Europe for quite a while now. Whether Europe is now the second best region is irrelevant to them. What is relevant to them is performing at Worlds and getting another chance to take on the best team in the world. What lessons have they learned from their defeat? If they played the whole series out again tomorrow, what would they do differently?
Talk of gaps opening and closing is really just a way for fans to console themselves. To a player, the only thing that matters is the result of the next game: win or lose. Losing 3-1 is better than losing 3-0, obviously, but what really matters is you learn from your mistakes. G2 definitely went down fighting against SKT but the important thing is that they want to build on that and improve. Perkz himself put it best on twitter: “we can take so much from this tournament #forward.”
Image courtesy of lolesports.
