Although Team Liquid had to play two best-of-three series on the fourth day of Manila Major playoffs, that didn’t stop them mopping the floor with both of their adversaries.
After eliminating NA’VI in the first matchup of the day, Team Liquid closed proceedings at the Mall of Asia Arena with another clean 2-0 victory, this time against the live audience favorites, Fnatic.
Game One
The series started with the typical push strategy from Liquid, who also made sure that they had the upper hand in team fights with a Disruptor. Kills were traded all over the map during the laning stage as both teams tried to hunt down and disrupt each other’s jungler but when the ten minute mark hit, Liquid gathered upon the bottom lane a and forced the first 5v5 fight to take the tier one tower. From there on they continued to move as one individual, took the first Roshan 16 minutes into the game and wiped out Fnatic four minutes later.
Despite great efforts from the Malaysian team to keep a grip on the game, they lost another big clash mid lane when Axe found a very good Blink - Call initiation on three Liquid heroes, but that transitioned immediately into disaster as Disruptor was able to catch Fnatic with the Kinetic Field-Static Storm combo and enabled his team to get another four kills.
As game progressed Roshan became a walk in the park for Liquid and the Amplify Damage from Slardar made the high ground offense extremely easy for his team. After losing two lanes of barracks in one push Fnatic admitted their defeat and called out the GG.
Game Two
The Lycan was the first to be taken out of the picture by Fnatic in the banning phase of the second game but even so, Liquid had their back up plan. They firstly picked Lifestealer and paired it with Riki and yet another Slardar for the infest bomb threat.
The silence - initiation power of the infested Riki, followed by Lion’s control spells, proved to be too much even for the tanky Medusa and Liquid started to build huge lead really early into the game. Continuously hunted down and forced to play very defensively, Fnatic had no chance at making a comeback. By the 30 minute mark Liquid gather a 30K gold advantage and was unstoppable. Not even a perfect Swap on the Dire high ground on the Lifestealer, while he was in the Rosh Pit, was enough to kill him, despite being isolated from his team. Instead it was Fnatic who lost three heroes and with that two set of barracks. After taking the objectives Liquid resumed their initial Roshan attempt but got contested again, this time Fnatic getting wiped and calling the GG immediately after.
Team Liquid’s journey will continue tomorrow, June 11th in the lower bracket semifinals where they will play the winner between LGD and MVP.
