Is NRG the dark horse of this tournament?
Facing elimination, NRG came out strong in the lower bracket match yesterday. Pulling off a surprise win against GHOST, NRG will now face the loser of XSET and 100Thieves. Only the top two teams at the VCT NA Challengers will go to Masters. Can NRG make a lower bracket run to the Grand finals?
The NRG Valorant roster has been bootcamping to fix some of the issues with their playstyle. In the post-match interview, NRG Hazed singled out their defense as the weak point in their gameplay. One of the main focuses of the recent bootcamp was to strengthen their defense, and the defense looked impressive in their match against GHOST.
"We kind of showed [on Icebox] that our defense is really strong. It's something that we've kind of suffered with for a long time," said Hazed. "Our defense is really bad across all maps. This bootcamp is like for us to focus on our defense and it's showing. It was the weakness in our game. As long as we and play a solid defense, our attacks have always been good. I'm not really worried about our attack."
NRG survive elimination match against GHOST
When we won those rounds, we were all talking about it.[...]'There's no way they can recover from that.
It was a team effort for NRG on Breeze as they matched GHOST for every round in the first half. But the NRG attack looked very impressive as they allowed GHOST just one round win in the second half.
Three NRG players had an ACS of over 200 with eeiu leading the pack at 247. However, it was ethan that had the highest kills on NRG with 18 kills and most of these frags were impact frags as well.
Speaking about Ghost Gaming’s Breeze pick, NRG Hazed was not particularly surprised by their decision.
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"They are very comfortable on Breeze," Hazed explained on Ghost's map pick choice. "They had won 9 or so games in a row before losing to EG. So we figured they probably want to play that map, they're super comfortable on it. One loss isn't enough for a team to suddenly not want to play it. We expected Breeze."
NRG Hazed on Breeze map pick. NRG won Breeze 13-7.
Ghost came in strong on Icebox winning 9 rounds on their defense. But the 9-3 curse was real for them as they could not hold off NRG on the flip. S0m and tex were impressive on the attack getting crucial kills. However, there were a lot of clutch victories for NRG as well.
We won maybe like 4-5 clutches in a row. When we won those rounds, we were all talking about it. But specifically I'll say what I said. 'There's no way they can recover from that.' They are just mental doomed. We got this, we're going to win 2-0'.
NRG are already in the top six at the VCT NA Stage 2 Challengers. The top two Challenger teams will receive an invitation to the VCT Stage 2 Masters tournament.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for the latest Valorant news and updates.
Image Credit: NRG.
