ESL comments on dAT matter

The Ukrainian team were forced to withdraw from the CIS pre-qualifier for the upcoming major following a scheduling conflict between this tournament and StarSeries that, in Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy's words, was the fault of ESL.

dAT saw themselves in a situation in which they had to choose between the ESL One Katowice pre-qualifier and SLTV StarSeries, and they opted to pull out of the former.

Contacted by HLTV.org, ESL put together the following statement about this situation:

"After dAT didn’t show up for their match in our ESL One CIS qualifier last night they published a statement about it today. We would like to issue a statement of our own regarding the situation.

"On Monday 26th we had some internal miscommunication within ESL about the dates of the CIS qualification and possible changes. During that time SLTV approached us in an internal skype channel for league organizers, asking about our CIS qualification. Unfortunately we gave them a wrong date at this time. However, we didn’t know why they would need that information specifically, nor that this was about rescheduling matches for dAT, as we were not aware of the full SLTV schedule and they didn’t mentioned anything about it.

"During the night from Monday to Tuesday an official announcement has been posted in our ESL CIS section where the tournament has been organized, with detailed information regarding the upcoming qualification including the schedule, stating that the tournament would start on Wednesday 28th. 

"On Wednesday 28th during the afternoon dAT officially contacted ESL for the first time about the CIS qualification and stated that they would be unable to participate as two of their members have real-life commitments due to the wrong information they got on Monday. Up until that moment, dAT had not approached ESL directly to get any information about the qualification nor did they check the announcement in our ESL CIS section which had the all information including the schedule. We told them that there is nothing we could do at that point as rescheduling the whole tournament was not an option. Due to their question, we already told them at the time that it would not be possible for them to participate in any European qualification. dAT then went on and started to play the qualification on Wednesday night even though they told us earlier that it would be impossible for two of their members to participate at that night. 

 "On Wednesday night, after the first day was over, we got approached once again by dAT through a third party manager from another organization and they asked us if it would be possible to delay their match due to the Best-of-Three match they had to play against NaVi at SLTV. We told them that it wouldn’t be possible to delay the match as this would delay the whole tournament, affecting multiple matches and several other teams. The only chance to delay a match in that qualification would be if it was the final, but not in the middle of the lower bracket.

 "It would have been easier for everyone if they had been able to rescheduled their SLTV match instead, as that was just a single match and not a tournament with multiple matches and teams playing at the same night. But SLTV didn’t allow them to reschedule either. dAT then decided on Thursday to not further participate in the CIS qualification and play their SLTV match instead. This lead to a default win for their opponent in the ESL One qualification."