I wanted to try and form a stronger opinion for myself about what’s going on with Spirit at the moment and why they’re not making the team function the way they really should. This is a team that has probably the best player in the world in Donk, a renowned AWP in Sh1ro, and a core of strong riflers in TN1R and Zont1x and all behind the leadership of Magixx. With this kind of lineup, the expectations are naturally high and when they’re at their best it’s a scary display of firepower. On the other hand though, when they don’t end up winning a tournament like Blast Open that just recently finished, I think it’s reasonable to think a bit harder about what is going on.
The Hally question in my opinion is simultaneously one of the most interesting and dramatic ones, but also somewhat boring because it’s so hard for us from the outside to really know for sure what kind of an impact he might be having either positively or negatively. The interesting thing is that for once we have what feels like a curious extra data point to the conversation, because Hally was temporarily sidelined by health issues, which promoted S0tf1k to secondary coach or in moments a toy frog instead. If things had proceeded as normal this probably wouldn’t mean that much, but there were some really notable performance changes in the individuals on the team while Hally wasn’t around. tN1R being perhaps the most stand-out player who seemed to suddenly play like his old self again during IEM Rio and the PGL Astana events. Zont1x for my money also appeared to play a more relaxed style which seemed to result in him finding better engagement in key rounds. Do we know for a fact that this means Hally is the problem here? Not really, but it certainly did fuel a lot of drama. For this last Blast Bounty event Hally was back again finally and Spirit did make the grand final to play Mouz, which many people thought would be a sure fire win for Spirit. But it wasn’t. I still don’t really know if Hally is to blame, but I know that there are a lot of problematic things that keep popping up in their gameplan, so let’s dive into that.
The opening map of the Grand Final was Dust2 with Spirit starting on the T side of the map. Back in the Chopper days before Magixx was the IGL Spirit were unquestionably the best team in the world at playing one very particular mini-game on Dust2. Let’s call this game “catwalk or mid”. It’s a deceptively simple game to play and it goes like this: On the T side you take over the catwalk area leading into the A bombsite and from there you try to force the CTs into trying to guess if you’re actually going to A or out mid to B instead. Chopper played this game so well that most top level teams ended up defending the wrong position over and over again, but in the modern day, a team like Mouz has other solutions, here is round 4:
What this screenshot shows is the beginning of an attack that hits both catwalk and mid at the same time. The upside here is that as soon as you’re hopefully successful in mid, you can disengage your catwalk fight and stop rotations instead. The problem Spirit are running into is that they’re doing this while Mouz have already smoked long and upper-dark. These two smokes allow for both B defenders to hold mid against Magixx and for three defenders to hold A against the catwalk. In other words, Mouz aren’t guessing, they’re using their smokes as a 6th and 7th man holding positions and it gives them an overwhelming advantage.
Another thing Mouz did really well to stop Spirit from setting up their midrounds well, was simply pushing into them at certain moments, like this situation in round 6:
I want to draw your attention to PR who is a second away from killing zont1x in upper dark. Donk is already dead in the middle a second earlier to Torzsi’s AWP, so at this point the rest of Spirit are about to stuck behind the long smoke xertioN is throwing. From here Spirit go back catwalk and try a very telegraphed attack on A, which ultimately fails to do more than get a bomb planted. The thing I want to really stress here is that Spirit don’t react well when they’re interrupted in the midround setups, which is something Mouz was clearly leaning on in the Grand Final. What worries me is that it seems to me that the problem for Spirit here is somewhat mirrored when they get to the CT side. I wanted to try and prove this, so I went and looked at how much Mouz and Spirit actually move forward on the CT side of the map throughout the entire playoffs, here are those screenshots:
Both screenshots are taken somewhat arbitrarily at 1:26 in the round. But it’s very obvious that Mouz are a lot more aggressive in looking for openings against their opponents than Spirit are. This dynamic has some interesting consequences that we again can draw back to earlier in the article, take round 19 as an example:
I will draw your attention to the two smokes we also highlighted when Mouz were on the CT side, one long and one upper dark. The difference here is that tN1R is still actually holding long and Spinx is able to push and punish in the event that both B defenders have left the bombsite. This is almost an exact mirror of the round we discussed earlier, but these small differences in setup make a huge difference in outcome. For one Mouz have a more dedicated attack to mid with a devastating flash thrown from xertioN, but because of the lack of information for Spirit, they’re also not fully ready fight from CT spawn, and it ends up costing them the round.
For the final round of the map:
Spirit actually did try to push a bit early on, but they still end up in this 4v4 situation towards the end. The problem is that this kind of setup ends up relying a lot on the hope that Mouz either go B through upper or long. This still leaves mid and catwalk open, which basically means you’re flipping a coin to hope you’re in the right positions. Add to this that they had a very low economy, meaning you might not even win the fight if the coinflip comes out in your favour, I think it would have been cool to see Spirit take more of a risk in order to improve their odds and actually find out what Mouz are doing.
I think many of the same core problems carry their way through the Mirage game, and just to draw a bit of a parallel, is here an example again at 1:26 in the round, showing how much each team actually pushed forward on the CT side of that map, first Spirit:
Then Mouz:
I don’t want to try and make a somewhat one dimensional argument that “more pushing is better”, what I am trying to get to is that it sometimes feels like Spirit are just too reliant on holding further back and trusting in their aim. When that plan works, the rounds are pretty great, but very often in recent times, a lot of teams are so well prepared to fight Spirit, that the back of information they get on their CT sides, is a genuine problem. As a contrast I want to show a few short clips of Mouz adding a bit more CT aggression into their play and what kind of success can be found, throughout the playoffs Mouz flashed the A ramp 3 times on Mirage:
Here are the resulting clips of what followed, first vs zont1x in the Grand Final:
Second vs Donk also in the Grand Final:
And lastly earlier in the tournament vs Astralis:
By contrast, Spirit flashed the A ramp a total of zero times in the playoffs. If we zoom out, these might be small details, obviously Mirage isn’t won or lost by who flashes the A ramp the most. But again the point isn’t so much about these smaller things, but more about the overall perspective of taking a smaller risk in order to gain a much bigger reward. It doesn’t feel to me like Spirit are willing to do that enough on their CT sides, and it’s costing them.
Maybe in the future we can dive into further maps, but I am curious what you guys think is at the core of the Spirit problem? Is it even a problem or are people, myself included, simply over-reacting?
