The French Vitality, featuring Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut, have defeated Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev’s Na’Vi to advance straight to the CSGO semi-finals of EPICENTER in Moscow, Russia. Vitality retaliated in impressive fashion after losing the first map of the best-of-three encounter, with ZywOo making a statement in the process.
Vitality recompose after first map loss
The encounter kicked off on Dust2, selected by Vitality. The map went all sorts of wrong for the French as Kirill “Boombl4” Mikhailov switched on for his side to attain an incredible 2.27 HLTV rating 2.0 and getting 28 frags over the course of 20 rounds. Na’Vi pulled way ahead, and by halftime the score was already 13-2 for the CIS squad. Vitality tried to make up the difference by getting the pistol and the subsequent round, but that would be of no use as Na’Vi got the next three rounds to close out the map 16-4.
The next two maps, Inferno and Nuke, were an entirely different story. The two maps saw the star of Vitality, ZywOo, turn into a machine that would lead the way to a dominant victory on both maps. Despite an overall team effort on Inferno, it was the young Frenchman that got an impressive 25 frags and carved the path to an even more impressive 16-3 victory.
The decider map, Nuke, followed an almost identical pattern as Vitality also swept Na’Vi 16-3. This time, ZywOo was joined by Cédric “RpK” Guipouy at the top of the leaderboard, though it was another overall fantastic team effort. S1mple failed to have any sort of impact on the outcome of the decider map and ended with a disappointing 4-2-17 score. This is something we are not used to seeing from, according to many, the best current CSGO player in the world.
Vitality move on to the semi-final of EPICENTER while Na’Vi will need to face an opponent in the quarter-finals of the event in Russia.
ZywOo vs. s1mple battle continues
ZywOo has been frequently named anything along the lines of “the next s1mple.” Today, however, the Frenchman was on a whole different level than his Ukrainian rival. Despite Na’Vi taking the first map, it was not s1mple who was the most responsible for his side’s victory. Additionally, the Ukrainian failed to deliver when his team needed him most. On Inferno, the whole Na’Vi team crumbled with s1mple failing to make a statement impact. Furthermore, on Nuke, s1mple was the bottom fragger, and it seems like he just gave up on trying to win. By comparison, ZywOo had a fantastic showing, and he is clearly gunning for s1mple’s #1 spot.
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