Team Liquid win highly anticipated matchup with Sentinels at Champions

One of the most highly anticipated games of the group stage of VALORANT Champions took place Saturday. North America’s Sentinels and Europe’s Team Liquid faced off in the Group B winner’s match.

The match garnered over 200,000 viewers on Twitch and over 700,000 including various other platforms, according to Esports Charts. Viewers were given a show with how close some of the maps went. Team Liquid put on a fantastic show, and were able to beat the two-time Masters winners 2-1.

For Team Liquid coach Connor “Sliggy” Blomfield, this was the matchup they had been waiting for.

“It's a big grudge matchup. I have wanted to play them for like, a year now, honestly, since the beginning of the game, so yeah, everyone was super pumped for it,” Sliggy told Nerd Street in a postmatch interview. “I know that a lot of people have [Sentinels] as favorites. So it was nice to get this one.”

Although the second map was a stomp for Sentinels, the first and last maps were nail-biters. Fans and players alike all sat on the edge of their seats while the game played out.

“It was pretty nerve-wracking watching,” Sliggy said. “Yeah, it was awesome. Again, super happy with just everyone's mentality, just staying calm and honestly just calling really good stuff. … Hopefully it was a good series to watch.”

The first map, Breeze, was a back and forth battle, with Sentinels dominating the first half, and TL dominating the second. Although TL had to play catch-up in the second half, they were able to secure most of the rounds, sending the match into overtime. The map ended with TL scoring 14 to Sentinels’ 12.

On Bind, it was an all-out showing of what Sentinels can really do on a map they’re comfortable with. Tyson “TenZ” Ngo absolutely fragged out with an impressive 12/6 K/D and a 368 ACS. That’s more than double the highest TL fragger, which was Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom who had a 10/12 K/D and a 185 ACS. No one on TL even broke an ACS of 200.

Photo credit: Riot Games

Coach Sliggy said that snowballing was the biggest factor on Bind, and three integral rounds were lost which led to a tough game of catch-up against a team that was highly prepared for them.

“They had a very good gameplan going in. They definitely abused our Long B quite a lot. So it's something that we need to look into for the future. So again, shout out to them for having a really good game plan on their attack,” Sliggy said.

The last map on Split had fans on both sides biting their nails, and neither side was ever comfortable. The two teams really dragged out the NA vs. EU narrative, keeping the score within two rounds throughout the duration of the last map.

This time, it was ScreaM’s turn to be the only one to breach an ACS of over 300, ending the map with a score of 321 and a 25/15 K/D. On Sentinels’ side, TenZ who played Jett, was near the bottom in terms of stats with a K/D of 12/20 and ACS of 141.

“I don’t think the Jett was a problem at all,” Jared “zombs” Gitlin said. “I think we just threw a lot of rounds there that we should never lose, or we had a big advantage and that’s why we lost the game.”

Whether TenZ just wasn’t on his game, or Team Liquid just knew how to beat him doesn’t really matter to Liquid now, since they’ll happily move on to the playoff bracket, while Sentinels will get another shot to advance to the playoffs in the decider match.

Sentinels will have to beat the winner of the elimination match between either FURIA Esports or KRÜ Esports. If FURIA beat KRÜ, they’ll have a rematch with Sentinels, who originally sent them to the elimination round after their 2-1 victory over the Brazilian team.

Lead photo credit: Riot Games