Inner Circle ended their BLAST Open Porto 2026 run with a 0:2 loss to FUT, but Viktor “onic” Babii believes the event was a positive step for the roster despite missing the playoffs. In a post on his personal Telegram channel after the elimination, onic praised the progress of the players and staff, highlighted the victory over Vitality and explained how the team worked on its mentality after the loss to MOUZ.
Inner Circle faced Vitality, MOUZ and FUT during the tournament. They opened their campaign with a 2:0 upset over Vitality before losing 0:2 to MOUZ and eventually being eliminated by FUT.
The Vitality win was an important experience for Inner Circle
The biggest result of the tournament came in the opening match. Inner Circle defeated Vitality 13:8 on Anubis and 16:13 on Cache to start their BLAST Open Porto campaign with a 2:0 victory.
Vitality were playing with Justinas “jL” Lekavicius as a stand-in for William “mezii” Merriman, but onic said that did not make the victory less valuable for Inner Circle.
I don’t care what anyone says — that they weren’t in form, that they had a stand-in or anything else. For us, this is a very important victory. Whatever form they were in, it’s Vitality.
For onic, facing opponents of this level throughout the event was valuable on its own. He described BLAST Open Porto as the first tournament of this level for the roster where they consistently had to play against some of the strongest teams in attendance.
Beating them is a really great experience for us, and I think it also shows that we are moving in the right direction.
MOUZ punished every mistake
The next series was completely different. MOUZ defeated Inner Circle 13:4 on Ancient and 13:5 on Mirage, and onic admitted that his team struggled mentally during the match.
He felt Inner Circle did not show enough resistance and had problems recovering once MOUZ took control.
It really felt like mentally we weren’t quite there and it was difficult for us. They punished us literally for every mistake, and we couldn’t properly adapt and pull ourselves together at the right moment.
According to onic, the team spent a lot of time discussing the problem after the defeat. The main goal was to avoid mentally disconnecting from another match when the score started going against them.
Inner Circle saw a different mentality against FUT
Inner Circle were eliminated after losing Mirage 9:13 and Nuke 6:13 to FUT. Despite the final scores, onic felt the performance was better than the previous series, especially in terms of communication and mentality.
He believes Mirage could have gone in the other direction if a few individual situations had played out differently.
Mirage could have been ours. Just a couple of situations — a bad call from me somewhere, somewhere we pressed the wrong button a little — and it went the other way. But we actually played the map pretty well.
onic had a similar view of Nuke. Inner Circle fell far behind during the map, but he pointed to the response from the players as one of his main positives from the entire tournament.
Even when the score was 3:12, we had very good team speak. We communicated really well and genuinely felt that even from that score we could still take rounds.
For onic, that was a clear improvement compared to what happened against MOUZ only a day earlier.
“I’m very proud of my team”
Inner Circle ultimately left BLAST Open Porto without a playoff appearance, but onic said he could not describe the tournament as a bad one. The roster experienced a win over Vitality, a difficult defeat against MOUZ and an elimination series where the players continued communicating and fighting despite falling behind.
First of all, I just want to say that I’m very proud of my team. We are really progressing in front of our eyes.
onic also credited the coaching and analytical staff, saying the entire group is improving together. He believes the event gave Inner Circle valuable experience both inside the server and mentally while also showing them what still needs work.
I’m confident this tournament will give us a big boost in the future, and we will only keep progressing and moving in the right direction.
He ended the message by thanking everyone who supported Inner Circle during the tournament and said the amount of support the team received was something they could genuinely feel.
