FaZe needs to make changes — not to their roster but to their approach
FaZe dropped out of yet another important tournament way earlier than they were supposed to. In the quarter-final of the Corsair DreamHack Masters Stockholm 2018, the team lost to mousesports in a very interesting best-of-three.
Interesting mainly because of the fact that it was the FaZe Clan that won the first map, Cache, which was mouz’s pick, with 16–1. Afterwards, however, mousesports was able to turn things around and win the following two maps.
As mentioned above, this is not the first time that this can be said about a tournament performance of FaZe who had been the best team in the world not too long ago.
While going through their tournament history, many events leap to the eye where FaZe has been heavily favored to win it all haven’t been able to do so. Examples would be events like V4 Future Sports Festival, Intel Grand Slam events like IEM Oakland 2017, IEM Katowice 2018 and ESL One Cologne 2018 and, finally, ELEAGUE events like the Premier 2018 and, of course most famously, the ELEAGUE Major 2018 at the beginning of the year.
One of the events where they were able to go all the way, however, was IEM Sydney 2018 — intriguingly, in this Grand Final, they were the underdog vs. Astralis.
It can’t be a coincidence that as soon as they find themselves in high-stakes situations where they are slated the favorites against lesser teams, they more often than not crack under that pressure.
The fact of the matter is that a team of FaZe’s caliber should convert more of those performances into successful ones — only one of those finals against Ninjas in Pyjamas and fnatic would have been enough for them to now be the winner of the Intel Grand Slam Season 1.
Back in May, after their win Down Under, I already mentioned that I think FaZe desperately needs a sports psychologist to help them with these aspects of the game because, now even more so than back then, it is glaringly obvious that they cannot solve these problems by themselves in the current setup.
Obviously, this isn’t an issue that is easily solvable and I don’t want to make it sound like everything will be fixed by this simple measure, but it still needs to be addressed — and from the outside, it doesn’t look like it is being dealt with properly.
Everytime FaZe had a legitimate reason not to perform well, they did perform well in spite of that — or as karrigan said it back in May: “When people don’t expect us to win, we win.” No matter what the cause of this is, it is high time for the team to concern themselves with solutions — else it could be too late.
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For more on the FaZe Clan and the other teams who participated at the DreamHack Masters Stockholm 2018, you can listen to the latest episode of the Tuesday Morning Esports Talk! You can find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or here.
