FURIA take down NAVI to remain undefeated in ESL Pro League

NAVI struggled on the attack, letting 5-10 leads slip on both maps when on the offensive.

FURIA took revenge on Natus Vincere on the same maps that the two teams played at IEM Katowice one month ago, Mirage and Nuke, to tally their second ESL Pro League victory and remain neck-and-neck with Gambit at the top of the group. Two players had particularly stellar appearances for the Brazilian squad, Kaike "⁠KSCERATO⁠" Cerato on Mirage, with a 1.76 rating, and Yuri "⁠yuurih⁠" Santos on Nuke, where he had a 1.41 rating.

"I think we have a shot now," Andrei "⁠arT⁠" Piovezan said in the post-match interview regarding FURIA's chances of winning Group C, "we're in the driver's seat, but everyone we face will be a good opponent, nobody is playing bad now, even the match against MIBR tomorrow is going to be very tense."

The Brazilian squad started both maps on the attack, coming back from 5-10 deficits in the second half twice. Regarding their decision to start on the terrorist side on Nuke, arT said that "it's based on our history playing NAVI, when we start playing CT we struggle with the rounds a lot, we have trouble chaining rounds in a row. On T-side we feel less pressure so when we go to the CT side we don't feel like we have to win more rounds, we just need to win the game or play the best we can, it's more of a mental thing for us."

NAVI had a solid start on the CT side of Mirage, with Valeriy "⁠b1t⁠" Vakhovskiy playing the map for the first time since joining the team, which got off to a back-and-forth early on, but the CIS squad then dominated all the way up to the end of the half, 10-2, before FURIA were able to win three in a row. The Brazilian squad then flipped the script, going on a tear on the CT side as NAVI hit a wall, losing every single round all the way to a 10-16 defeat with a red hot KSCERATO leading the way with 29 kills.

Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev and company were back on the CT side in the first half of Nuke, their map pick, and once again took a hefty lead before the switch, 10-5. This time around they won the second pistol round and the first three T-side rounds to inch closer to closing out the map, but were once again put up against the ropes as FURIA cruised to victory, allowing only one more round before closing the series out 16-14.