Why G2 failed in Paris

One of the best teams in the world flopped in the Legends Stage. Here are some of the reasons why.

G2 came into the BLAST.tv Paris Major as the No. 4 team in the world and one of the favorites to go deep and challenge for the trophy. Instead they crashed out of the tournament before even making it to the playoffs, sent packing with two of their losses at the hands of teams ranked outside the top 10.

The form the European combine displayed in the Challengers Stage only served to heighten the shock at their disappointing capitulation. They had blitzed through the earlier stage of the tournament in dominant fashion, battering teams with sublime offensive efforts to stroll through with a 3-0 record. So what went wrong for G2 in the Legends Stage?

The first port of call is to check the raw stats — this isn’t going to give us a complete picture of what went wrong for G2 in the matches themselves, but it will help to point our investigation in the right direction.

There are a few numbers that jump right off the page and provide obvious threads to pick up on, and the first is the dramatic drop in G2’s T side round win percentage from Challengers to Legends, from 83.7% to 56.1%. It would be unfair to expect such a monumental success rate on offensive halves to be maintained, but G2 could clearly no longer rely on battering teams on the T side once they progressed.

The reason for this dramatic downturn on offensive halves becomes clear when you dig further: Ilya "⁠m0NESY⁠" Osipov’s Terrorist rating collapsed completely across the stages, from 1.72 to 1.03. His opening stats fell off a cliff as well, from 24.5% of attempts at an 83.3% success rate to 13.3% of attempts at a 53.8% success rate. Whilst teammates Nemanja "⁠huNter-⁠" Kovač and Justin "⁠jks⁠" Savage also experienced sizable rating drops on the T side, neither were to the dramatic extent of the Russian AWPer’s. This is not to say that m0NESY was the reason for G2’s failure, this simply shows that statistically G2 needed to get more from their CT side if they were to succeed, and the main reason for this is m0NESY could not win offensive halves single-handedly once the quality of opposition improved.

Why is that a problem? G2’s winrate on the CT side stayed exactly the same across the stages, a fairly poor 46.9%. Whilst one could argue that they simply needed to maintain their T side proficiency, as previously mentioned maintaining an 80%+ win percentage is simply not sustainable, and a 56% T side return should still be more than enough to win games. This seems particularly apparent when you consider the fact that the majority of maps played across both stages were CT-favored. Instead, it would be more reasonable to expect G2 to get themselves closer to the average for defensive halves.

Next we must ask if the trajectory of the games G2 lost in the Legends Stage fits the tentative conclusions we have drawn from the stats, and the answer to that is a resounding yes. G2 had several strong positions that they squandered in matches, namely a 10-5 lead going into their CT half against Bad News Eagles on Ancient, a 13-13 score on CT-side Nuke with Vitality on a half-buy, and a 13-12 lead on CT-side Vertigo against fnatic. In all three instances it was their defensive half that needed to get the job done, and all three times they failed to get the game over the line. They were even going at a decent enough clip on the T-side of their Ancient game against fnatic, but their six-round return in the first half on CT side gave them too little room to work with without m0NESY hard-carrying them to an astronomical offensive half.

So what happened in these games? Why did G2’s defensive side fail in each instance? There are some common themes that appeared across all four defeats, making it a little easier to paint a definitive picture. First we will summarize the theme in question, then we will examine a specific example of the theme costing G2 in one of their games, specifically on the CT halves mentioned above.

First, let's take a look at a map-specific issue. Problematic defensive halves scuppered G2’s efforts twice on Ancient, and the same glaring issue appeared in both games: G2 did not fight aggressively for middle or cave control in the right way, they would push middle with no pressure put on lane, or vice versa. So often G2 would be fighting towards elbow only to die from a defender on ledge because said defender didn’t have to worry about cave or banana, as in the clip below. Pay attention to how easy it was for Bad News Eagles to crunch the mid push because of the smoke locking off cave, Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač needed to call that smoke and cancel the play in middle or push through it. They would also often throw a single supporting flash with a player pushing cave, a measly piece of utility that is unlikely to catch everyone in lane or provide the pressure needed to make a push work, and at times they wouldn’t even bother with that. Being able to mix-up your approach aggressive manoeuvres is often key to an effective defense, and G2's understanding of how to do so on Ancient was flawed.

More generally across all maps, the individuals for G2 were overplaying their hand in the effort to make plays to win their team rounds. There were multiple examples of this across their CT efforts, but one came in round 12 of the Ancient game against fnatic, clipped below. With fnatic hitting the B site in a 3v3, a one-for-one trade comes through and m0NESY opts to re-peek from pillar towards banana, instead of retreating into cave to wait for jks and a 2v2 retake. You can argue the merits of the re-peek, but certainly the safer option with fnatic aware of his position was to use the smoke to escape into cave and play the retake.

Another example was evident in rounds 28 and 29 of the Ancient bout with Bad News Eagles, this time NiKo being the culprit. The Bosnian made a solo play pushing through cave in round 28, picking up two frags in lane for nothing. He attempted the exact same manoeuvre in the following round, again with no support from his teammates, only to find an AWP waiting for him. Once again, you can argue about the potential mind games of going for the same play two rounds in a row, but it’s a low-percentage move that relies on the element of surprise, and NiKo found himself punished in a key round on the second occasion. It seems likely he felt the pressure to continue making plays to save a game that was slipping through his team's fingers.

The final element of note was the tendency for G2 to be somewhat poorly coordinated on their defense, both in terms of supporting each other in key duels and in terms of rotations. One of the more costly examples was in the dying stages of the match against Vitality, in round 28. In the clip you can see that huNter- is caught behind silo because Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen did not fight aggressively enough to support him from heaven. Meanwhile m0NESY is sat holding outside for far too long, despite huNter- feeling the full brunt of the attack. Had HooXi fought more proactively from heaven, or had m0NESY reacted quicker and run up the ladder to support, G2 would have had a better chance of winning the round.

As is always the case with big moments in CS:GO games, there are debates to be had, namely that HooXi had already taken damage and was reluctant to throw away his life, or that m0NESY was holding for a potential lurk, but neither holds much weight. huNter- needed support, HooXi had to take the duel and risk his life one way or the other, and m0NESY could have still supported the upper defense from heaven and kept the potential flank timing under consideration whilst he did so. The fact HooXi dropped into the site with no support a few seconds later supports the assertion that coordination was poor, and the assertion that he should have just fought with huNter- when the hit came through.

So what does all this tell us? What was the overall problem with G2’s efforts? It boils down to two overarching factors.

Firstly, they were too reliant on their individuals outplaying their opposite number. In the Challengers Stage the raw skill of their players was enough to carry them to blowout offensive halves, and even on the CT side they were more likely to get multi-kills out of their anchors, or multi-kills from solo pushes. This was simply not the case against the increased caliber of opposition they played, they would be punished more often for their risk-taking, and their lack of coordination was no longer masked by the fact they could click heads better by comparison. It played out not just in terms of how they performed as a team, but also how they performed as individuals, evidenced by the overpeeking or overpushing in certain scenarios.

Secondly, their overall coordination on their CT side was often poor. This ties in closely with the first point, the fact they relied so often on solo pushes or poorly supported ones on their CT side is as much to do with putting too much trust in the individual, but it was also evidence of a problem in their underlying philosophy. They coordinated these aggressive manoeuvres poorly, and the fact that carried across even to situations where Ts were running into their crossfires and defensive setups lends more credence to the idea it was, in fact, a more fundamental problem.

So time for the TL;DR. G2's winrate on T side dropped dramatically from the Challengers to the Legends Stage, from around 80% to 56%, largely due to the fact they no longer could rely on m0NESY to carry things single-handedly. This meant G2 needed more out of their CT side, but instead it let them down in the key moments. It let them down specifically on Ancient because of a poor execution of how to aggress in middle and lane, and more generally because of an over-reliance on individual playmaking and poor coordination. Those last two points are key; G2's individuals made mistakes because they over-played their hand trying to win rounds with playmaking, and the team as a whole made mistakes because they coordinated poorly, reinforcing the need for individuals to step up and frag out.

Does this mean G2 are a bad team? No, by no stretch of the imagination is that the case. The games they lost came down to a handful of rounds, a deficit of only three in all but one of the maps they were defeated. They still got some magnificent performances out of their individuals across the whole tournament, so their individual level wasn't necessarily a problem, it was just not enough to be relied upon once they got to the Legends Stage. Instead they are a team that needs to tighten things up on the CT side, the side of the map that historically teams have been able to rely on their individual prowess to carry them through. Perhaps in modern CS it is no longer enough to have players capable of multi-fragging. Either way G2 failed in Paris, but there is no reason to think they can't bounce back and win another Big Event before the end of the year.