I knew they would lose as soon as I saw the switch to Eve.
Flowchart on should you play Eve professionally:
Are you good enough to have Eve banned against you, and is it currently banned? Maybe...
Eve is available? No, you should not play it.
I mean it is one of the most transparent, disrespectful picks you could make. Your win conditions are win in the first 10 minutes or have your team hard carry you 4v5 (because it isn't soloq).
If it was just an Eve pick, that would be bad, but this is CLG so it is much worse. First, they pick it early, while TL has 4 picks left to avoid pressure early game.
Going to gank Sion.... probably not.
Going to gank Azir.... probably not.
Going to counter jungle Ekko.... probably not.
Let see, that leaves hard farming, in which case Eve scales to nowhere - GG, or Eve goes bot (with an Ashe, Bard botlane). You couldn't make the play more obvious. Let's hope TL doesn't pick up on this cunning plan...
But it gets worse. I'm not going to hate on Xmithie here, but let's be real, he has his limitations. So why in the world would a sane coach/manager, put 100% of the pressure for winning the game on his shoulders, with no backup plan? And no, playing 4v5 as Eve looks on from the sidelines is not a backup plan.
But it gets worse. Rumble was available for Zion, which he crushes with. That would allow Xmithie to then play J4 or some other physical JG with an early game presence and doesn't fall off the cliff of uselessness late-game without kills. Or if you really wanted Zion on Gnar, Sej or even Shyvana would have been better.
CLG's loss to TSM was exactly the same though, pick a Lee Sin which had zero early game presence and auto-lose.
So yeah, if you tell a good professional team exactly what you are going to do before you do it, you should probably expect (and certainly deserve) to lose.
