Team Liquid sweep CLG 3-0 in Quarterfinals

The loud cheers for Team Liquid exploded at the sold out LCS play-offs match in LA. Legendary! Triple Kill! Ace! It wasn’t before too long Team liquid, finally unified as one team on the fields of justice, would take the last and final game from CLG, sweeping them in the quarterfinals 3-0. Tell me. Where was this Team Liquid before?

“Whoever wins game 1 is likely to take the series,” Piglet told Riot Games in the pre-series interview. After all, the key match-up here was between the World Champion himself and CLG’s ADC, Doublelift, whom Piglet called out as “overconfident” after his week 9 victory against Team 8. With such close playstyles, putting pressure on one team could spell disaster for the other.

Going into game 1, the team played with the drive to win. Left and right, TL and CLG duked it out and constantly secured kills on each other, tying up both the kill and gold count. While CLG did in fact play their split-push team composition really well with a 1-3-1 split push, taking a majority of our towers and owning the map, Team Liquid eventually got the team fight they wanted and pushed back the pressure CLG spent all game trying to secure. 5v5 after 5v5, eventually with Baron, would force CLG into their base and TL breaking through the front door.

After that game one victory in favor of TL, it was all downhill for CLG – nerves, lack of confidence, or perhaps momentum on the side of TL got to them. Game 2 involved TL running a protection composition with three supports and Piglet on Kog’maw. While CLG did have some shining moments, if Piglet was there, it wasn’t going to happen and the sheer gold lead—and mid-game double trinity spike—just pushed TL’s lead further and further. Eventually, TL’s lead was just too much that even a perfect initiation would not win the game. It was basically over after 25-minutes.





Game 3 was just straight annihilation. After 18-minutes, Quas was basically killing whoever he pleased. It was one of those moments where you just knew. It was over. I sat there, watching as TL pushed advantage after advantage. While I may have a bias towards TL (TLPro, come on…), I really wish play-offs teams the best in a 5-game series but game 3 was basically a win for TL; a perhaps otherwise guaranteed second TL victory if the series follows a W-L-W rotation. At the end of the day, there was just not enough momentum for CLG to stop the train TL created with their straight two victories to even make it to play-offs.

It would appear Piglet was right. A game 1 victory was crucial for both teams and TL just took it this time. While I doubt nerves would affect a world champion as much as it may others, perhaps if CLG had won that very-close game 1, the series would’ve been completely different. All I know is. WE DID IT BOYS. And we’re going into the semi-finals against Cloud 9, whom we just couldn’t beat in the pre-season, making this upcoming series all the more interesting.

At this point, I’m just glad Team Liquid is playing like how we envisioned. Maybe it’s not always perfect, but the improvements we’ve made with Piglet will help us in the long-term. The experience across all our players is just there and with some practice, sometimes that trumps all. With the amount of pressure we’ve been in the past few weeks, yet still coming out on top, the other teams should be afraid.