Natus Vincere have opened their ESL Pro League Season 24 campaign with a 2-0 win over G2, taking Cache 13-7 and Inferno 13-4, HLTV reported.
It is only the fourth match win of the season for Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy's side, and their first in 35 days. The roster had slid to 32nd in the Valve Regional Standings after a 9-16th place exit at the Esports World Cup, a 9-12th finish at BLAST Open Porto and a last-place exit at StarSeries Fall. That left them outside the cut-off for an invite to the PGL Major Singapore, which HLTV reported makes their results at ESL Pro League Season 24 and PGL Masters Bucharest all-important if the organisation is not to miss a Major for the first time in its history.
iM says the team has not felt the pressure
From outside the team, pressure has appeared to build: Natus Vincere missed the playoffs at the IEM Cologne Major, came into the second half of the year without making any changes, and struggled for purchase in the tournaments that followed. Mihai "iM" Ivan told the broadcast after the match that the players have not felt it yet.
Obviously we had a rough start to the season, and I think it looks... overall, in my opinion, it doesn't look that bad because we've had rough starts to the season before. And we had this Major [Cologne] that we kind of failed, we played badly and went out, and then this one-month break.
Ivan said the rankings matter less than the roster's lack of LAN titles. "The way I see it is that, obviously if you watch this statistic that we can be either #5 or #30 or #35, it doesn't matter, because we don't have LAN wins," he said. "I do not have any pressure because of that, only because if we are good, or decent enough, we for sure will make the Major no matter what."
Map pool work and a near career-worst map for huNter-
Natus Vincere's map pool has been a talking point since the break, and HLTV reported the team had clearly worked on it during the month off: they picked Cache to open the series. A 1-5 start was quickly reversed, and they conceded only two more rounds on the way to 13-7 off the back of strong team play.
That form carried into G2's Inferno pick, where Valeriy "b1t" Vakhovskiy, Ivan and Ihor "w0nderful" Zhdanov were close to unstoppable as G2's offence broke down at every turn. Nemanja "huNter-" Kovac recorded the second-worst map of his career, going 0-11 on the T side and finishing with a 1-15 K-D and a 0.19 rating.
