KOO Tigers’ KurO invites CLG to a beatdown

For Counter Logic Gaming fans, today’s showdown against the KOO Tigers for outright possession of 1st place in Group A ended up being a resounding faith-palm. Their Korean adversaries entered the matchup with egos in bandages coming off an unexpected loss against Taiwan’s Flash Wolves. KOO had no intention of stumbling over the next hurdle in its path to the exit leading out of Groups. According to KOO’s mid laner Seo-haeng “KurO” Lee, the setback only strengthened their resolve.

“After the loss to the Flash Wolves, we were down obviously,” he tell us. “There were some disagreements between the coaches and managers and the players. We had a lot of discussion about the picks and bans, and why we lost. We learned a lot from that game about picks and bans and how we wanted to prepare for upcoming games. So I think it was a good lesson learned. Because of that, it was easy for us to come out on top for this game.”

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KOO certainly made made the job look easy, punishing aggressive early moves from the American squad with horrifying swiftness. When CLG grouped up to push down the mid tower at the 9-minute mark, KOO clamped down on them like the mouth of a venus flytrap. An Enchanted Crystal Arrow from Jong-in “PraY” Kim’s Ashe in the top lane landed just as Kyung-ho “Smeb” Song Teleported in to unleash his Kennen ult. Then KurO on Viktor jumped in, brewing up a Chaos Storm to finally zero out Eugene "Pobelter" Park.

Pobelter’s Azir had barely returned to the field of play before KurO managed to kill him again, clipping the bird-like emperor’s wings once more. “I think CLG just didn’t have it in their calculation that we were going to play [Viktor] since we haven’t played it as much recently," says KurO. "Because of that, I think CLG left it open, not expecting us to play it. We saw other players and other teams play it in this tournament and have pretty good results so we just went ahead and picked it.”

A HUNDRED CC’S

With so much hard-crowd control on the side of KOO, any time a Morgana binding or Ashe arrow landed, it was almost too easy for KurO and Smeb to clean up with their AOE damage. There were several occasions in which a kill for CLG looked all but secure, before narrowly slipping away. “Obviously it wasn’t intended for us to leave [those fights] with a shred of health,” says KurO, smiling. “But we got lucky in that and [the game] went in our favour.”

After easily dispatching a 2-0 CLG, does KurO think America’s No. 1 seed was overrated? “We watched CLG’s first game versus Flash Wolves,” he says, “and we just thought that’s the level they play at, and that we could easily beat them. But we lost to the Flash Wolves, so it gave us an opportunity to look back on our game against them. So we were a little bit worried because CLG beat FW, and FW beat us. And we were facing CLG. So we just got our minds together and didn’t want to get too overconfident.”

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There’s a new NA challenger, however, that wasn't anticipated to be such a legitimate threat going into Worlds 2015. Cloud9 has rained on the parade of their first three opponents and now have the KOO Tigers’ full attention.

“We scrimmed against Fnatic a lot of times and were very impressed with their skills, says KurO. “We thought they were a very good team. But I saw C9 beat Fnatic today and that got my thoughts of C9 a lot higher. My thoughts on C9 weren’t that high before, but because of today’s result against Fnatic, I think C9 is a team to watch out for.”

Easy, Tigers. You’ll have your chance.