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The London Spitfire – who looked well out of sorts heading into the playoffs – have become the first team to qualify for the Overwatch League grand final after wrapping up a 2-0 series victory with a convincing Game 2 victory.
It looked like we’d be in for an accentuated repeat of Thursday’s Game 1, with the Valiant all at sea defending on Dorado early. Some great synergy by Bdosin (Choi-tae Seung) on Roadhog and Gesture (Jan-hee Hong) on Orisa caught Custa’s (Scott Kennedy) Mercy and from there, London steamrolled on.
They took the first two points without a single member of their team dying once and, once they eventually hit a roadblock late, anticipated the Valiant’s switch to dive comp smartly by switching Profit (Joon-yeong Park) over to Brigitte.
Los Angeles, however, were able to hold very admirably despite the horror start, only allowing the payload to reach its destination with four seconds in London’s timebank.
In reply, the home team once again opted for an off-meta tank duo – with Fate (Pan-seung Koo) on Reinhardt and Space (Indy Halpern) on Zarya. It looked dicey at first, but the Valiant were able to take the first point after a while.
Their performance through the second point was much more encouraging however, and they were able to punish a very sloppy retreat to spawn by the Spitfire to get the payload very close to the end.
But they succumbed to some sloppiness of their own – spreading themselves far too thin over the payload to get wiped out and, from there, they couldn’t recover. London took the first map 3-2 to put themselves in a very strong position.
London made some risky picks of their own heading into bogey map Oasis – throwing the metagame out the window with a crazy comp featuring birdring (Ji-hyuk Kim) as Reaper, Fury (Jun-ho Kim) as Soldier: 76 and NUS (Jong-seok Kim) as Lucio. Incredibly, it worked.
They took the first round of a map that had previously been their bane very easily, although found the going a lot tougher in the second round courtesy of some sublime flanking by the Valiant’s KariV (Young-seo Park) as Tracer.
But, again, Spitfire were able to work things back in their favour. Excellent Brigitte play from Profit allowed the visitors to flip the point at 95, before a panicked comp change from the home team blew up in their face.
Moving to a triple-tank line-up with Custa on Lucio and KariV on Moira, they mistimed a Zarya-D.Va combo that would’ve netted them five kills – and that was that. The 2-0 Map 2 win made it 2-0 in the match for London, putting them just one map away from advancing to the grand final.
After a rough time taking the first point on Eichenwalde – courtesy of some great Pharah play by Agilities (Brady Girardi) – the Spitfire were able to roll the payload all the way home with worrying ease once they’d gotten their hands on it.
Bdosin’s Tracer was causing all sorts of having on the first leg of the journey, with his double-support pulse bomb kill sealing the second point, before Valiant’s poor decision to run one support on the final leg was happily punished by the Spitfire.
But the home team weren’t done. Agilities continued to dominate the Pharah duel with Profit as they took the first point, before some excellent Tracer flanking by KariV allowed them to take the second point. It took them a bit longer to get to the final point, but London probably could have held them off a bit longer had they not panicked and switched to Mei with some time on the clock.
A signature dragonblade from Agilities’ Genji sealed the three point for Valiant as they entered the timebank phase with considerable crowd noise at their backs.
Unfortunately, for the home fans, it wasn’t to be.
With little more than a minute on the clock, Los Angeles were able to take capture the payload and get it just past the first gate – but no further. London were able to match their progress with ease – wrapping up a map win, match win and series win.