With their tournament lives at stake, Team Liquid’s Dota 2 roster survived an impossible onslaught vs Virtus.Pro at the DreamLeague Season 13 major, and just about nearly broke the set celebrating.
Team Liquid may not have Amer ‘Miracle-” Al-Barkawi on their roster anymore, after he and the Dota 2 International 2017 championship roster left to form Nigma at the end of 2019, but the new Liquid roster aren’t short on making their own miracles.
The former Alliance roster needed that miracle in their first-round lower bracket match against Virtus.Pro. With just one game deciding the series, both teams needed one win to stay alive, and despite maintaining control for most of the match, Liquid found themselves in dire straits after 71 minutes.
VP were pushing down onto the Liquid base with all five of its members, and with only two Liquid players alive in Samuel ‘Boxi’ Svahn and Tommy ‘Taiga’ Le. Taiga had just bought back, and was able to take down one VP player in Roman ‘Resolut1on’ Fominok, but hope still looked lost.
Then, suddenly, the unthinkable happened.
Vitalie ‘Save-’ Melnic strayed too far from his teammates, allowing Taiga to pick off another Virtus.Pro player. After losing two, VP focused their attention on the Liquid fountain, but Taiga was still focused on pulling off the comeback.
He dropped two more players before Boxi cleaned up the last, erasing the enemy team with less than 10% of their base’s health left, leaving the casters bewildered.
With no buybacks available for the Virtus.Pro side, and Liquid players respawning and flying over to their fountain, they called “gg wp,” securing the win for the Liquid side, and prompting an ecstatic celebration from the victors that caused them to topple over, crashing into chairs as they went down.
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Another caster, Austin ‘Capitalist’ Walsh captured an extended look at the celebration and shared it on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/DotACapitalist/status/1219755346119528448
Thankfully no one was hurt as the Liquid team piled on top of the clutch Taiga, but sadly, the egos and confidence of Virtus.Pro must be hurting.
VP were considered favorites at TI9 back in August, but crashed and burned again on The International stage. They re-tooled after that tournament, but went a disappointing 0-5 at DreamLeague Leipzig, and finished in last place.
The disappointment heard on the CIS casters’ call of the final play requires no translation.
With the victory, Liquid awaits the winner of Na’Vi and the roster’s former club in Alliance. DreamLeague Season 13 is the first major of the 2020 Dota Pro Circuit, and features a prize pool of $1 million and 15,000 DPC points.