Origen and Fnatic help fans mind-wipe Worlds 2014

Last year’s World Championship was a bristly nut to choke down for European fans.

You’ve heard of the Jules Verne classic Around the World in 80 Days. Well, for the European squads, their trek around Worlds in 2014 lasted...eight. Not one of the region’s teams made it out of the Group Stage. It was ugly and more than a little heartbreaking for fans of the region. Though probably worthy of a trigger warning for European readers, let’s take a moment to reflect on the plight of the EU region in last year’s tournament.

SK Gaming elected to get a jump on the fatal misplays before the tournament even began. The team’s jungler Dennis "Svenskeren" Johnsen got slapped with a $2,500 fine and suspension for cultural insensitivity during the team’s practice period in Taiwan prior to the start of Groups, which would force him to sit out the first three games of the tournament. SK went on to lose their first four games before mopping up a pair of consolation wins against the Taipei Assassins and Team SoloMid so they didn’t have to be hastily ushered back onto the plane like humiliated defendants shirking eye contact with reporters between the courtroom and their getaway transport.

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The mighty Fnatic was next to flame out. This was the team that had made it to the Semifinals in 2013 and briefly looked like they might bounce back from a deficit against Royal Club to grab a spot in the finals against SKTelecom T1. We assumed they’d make it out of Groups in 2014, yet fate stymied them as well. En route to a disappointing 2-4 record in Groups, their most gutting loss came against China’s OMG, whose Nexus was one auto-attack from falling in a 71-minute slugfest. Fnatic’s members, as they recently described the sequence of events to us, lost their cool and took turns sieging OMG’s Nexus instead of banding together and closing out the game with patience and coordination. The faux pas was indicative of the breakdown in team communication that had already beset the team toward the end of the Summer Split.

Next up in the sordid 2014 saga, there was Alliance. Europe’s No. 1 seed. They’d dethroned Fnatic in the Summer Split Finals at Gamescom, piercing the armour of a team that at one point in time had seemed impregnable, having won every single split since the inception of the LCS, at least until coming second to Froggen’s super-team. Europeans believed this ascendant Alliance had a decent chance of being competitive on the international stage.

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When they pulled off a perfect game against NaJin White Shield, Alliance seemed destined to advance. Until they threw their game against winless Brazilian Wildcard team KaBuM, that is, which ended up being their final game. For many European fans, it was almost worse than having Alliance drop all their games in a flaming death spiral. They got hopes way up, then fizzled out like a waterlogged cherry bomb at the last crucial second. (Or Fizz-led, if we’re specifically referencing Henrik “Froggen” Hansen’s baffling all-ins with The Tidal Trickster in his team’s KaBuM loss.)

Anyway, that was then. That was a year ago, a few salty tears ago. That was 2014.

A NEW DAWN

EU fans endured a dark night of the soul. A full-rack ribbing from NA fans, who saw Team SoloMid and Cloud9 both make it to the Quarterfinals in respectable fashion. Europe weathered the coinage of the verb “KaBuM’d." They swallowed their pride, and their medicine. Looking toward a more competitive showing in 2015, EU fans who pray, prayed. Fans who hope, hoped. They wished upon a ’StaR.

Now here we are in 2015.

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Not one but two of Europe’s teams have made it to the Quarterfinals. Origen stands a decent chance of getting to the Semis, having drawn the Flash Wolves (like Origen, 4-2 in Groups) for their Quarterfinals opponent instead of a team from the historically intimidating Korean or Chinese leagues. Fnatic will endure a stiffer test going up against China’s EDG, but the team that claimed first place in the Mid-Season Invitational a few months ago has had moments during this World Championship in which they’ve looked distinctly vulnerable. Case in point, EDG almost got KaBuM’d (hey, if the shoe fits) by the Bangkok Titans. The Titans, who would leave the Group Stage 0-6 jumped out to a miraculous-seeming early lead against EDG, but you could sense their belief faltering, at which time the momentum swung back EDG’s way with neck-spraining velocity.

What changed in the intervening year?

The members of Fnatic’s 2014 squad accepted the fact that dynasties, like marriages, can reach a point where soldiering on does nobody any favours. In a situation where it’s easy to imagine feeling pressure to stay together for the fans, they made the hard but important decision to splinter. This allowed a player like Lauri "Cyanide" Happonen who was burnt out on League to take a step back from competing. When I spoke to Paul “SoaZ” Boyer for a recent article, I asked him if he ever missed that old five-man lineup that many instinctively call to mind upon hearing the word ‘Fnatic’. “I don't really miss playing with Cyanide or Rekkles or Yellow,” he told me. “I think that everyone is good where they are now. And there are reasons that people stayed there and now are playing with each other.”

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Regardless of its precipitating factors, the Fnatic split proved beneficial because it allowed the phenomenal veteran talent within the team to scatter and cross-pollinate the wider European scene. It’s no surprise that the two European teams progressing into the Knockout Stage each contains two members of last year’s Fnatic lineup. Origen has Enrique “xPeke” Martínez and SoaZ. Fnatic has Bora “YellOwStaR” Kim and Martin "Rekkles" Larsson. Maybe if Cyanide had stuck around one more season and joined H2K, the pixie dust of that old Fnatic lineup would’ve propelled all three of EU’s teams through (ok, ok, wishful thinking).

You see this trend occur in the corporate arena. A business with a high concentration of talent will occasionally lay off a heap of its staff or straight-up tank. Fast-forward one year and suddenly there are a number of promising startups in the area populated with the talent that used to all be centralized under one roof. It’s obviously far more depressing when the breakup involves your favourite team rather than a faceless corporation, but the outcome can be similarly catalytic. Talented upstarts can benefit hugely from playing alongside seasoned vets. Just consider the time-lapse maturation of Origen’s rookie Jesper "Niels" Svenningsen. It’s hard to imagine him making the kind of strides he has in the professional arena without that input. He’s got veteran mentors talking in his headset for 10+ hours a day, sharing hard-won situational game knowledge. Certainly can’t hurt in the furnace of star formation.

IN THE (EURO) ZONE

Adding to the current euphoria of the European faithful is the very soil beneath the venues hosting the 2015 World Championship. The lining inside the collar of this year’s commemorative Worlds training jacket bears the names of each host city: Paris, London, Brussels, Berlin. The venue hosting the Finals -- Berlin’s Mercedes-Benz Arena -- is just a 20-minute drive from the studio that hosts the weekly broadcasts of the EU LCS during the regular season.

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If either Origen or Fnatic can push through to that final test, don’t think the serendipity of a European team playing in a European-based Finals will be lost on a single soul in attendance. And if by some cosmic Bard-like intervention, the Final ends up having two European teams facing off, well, EU fans can just die and be whisked off to esports heaven straightaway.

The heartbreak of Europe’s premature exit at Worlds last year makes this year’s run all the sweeter. And 2015’s book is still cracked wide open. We’ll see how many giddy exclamation marks Origen and Fnatic can scribble inside before it goes back on history’s shelf at the end of October.

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You can see Origen attempt to overcome the Flash Wolves Thursday October 15 at 17:00 British Time, 18:00 Central European Summer Time, or 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

Fnatic takes on EDG Saturday October 17 at 14:00 British Time, 15:00 Central European Summer Time, or 6:00 AM Pacific Time.

For more Quarterfinals and Worlds content, visit Lolesports.

Jason Killingsworth is a senior writer for Riot Games, based in the company’s Dublin office. When he’s not being a beacon of deadpan journalistic objectivity, he paints Origen and Fnatic logos on his bare chest and babbles like a demoniac at his laptop screen. He can be found on Twitter @RiotWhiski and has previously written about the history of lane-swaps in professional play.