Natus Vincere’s 3-0 loss to MOUZ ON Sunday at the ESL Pro League Season 18 finals means that the organization’s Counter-Strike captain Aleksib will leave CS:GO in the most embarrassing way after finishing with a 0-15 losing streak in best-of-five grand finals.
Aleksib’s losing streak started with ENCE in 2019 when Aleksib was still leading the organization’s all-Finnish lineup. Sunday’s game was his last chance to banish the streak and end CS:GO well before the switch to CS2. However, things didn’t go well for NAVI, who were easy prey to MOUZ in the grand finals losing without winning a single map.
Sunday’s fixture between NAVI-MOUZ was the last tier-one grand finals of CS:GO esports, but before then, Aleksib had lost by 3-0 twice to FaZ with two different teams, G2 and OG; the other losses have been to one Gambit, and Team Liquid.
Meanwhile, some fans have tagged Aleksik as a bad in-game leader after the game, forgetting that in as much as his personal best-of-five grand finals record is disappointing, his teammates cannot be absolved of the blame; after all, Counter-Strike is a team game, and the captain can’t oversee everything his teammates are doing during matches.
This is in addition to the fact that he lost some of these finals to obviously superior teams, such as Liquid’s Intel Grand Slam squad, FaZe Clan at IEM New York 2020, and Gambit at IEM Summer 2021.
Meanwhile, he can put the best-of-five grand finals record behind him and write a new chapter in CS2 esports, as he’ll likely remain as NAVI’s captain.
NAVI is one of the 16 teams going to the first big CS2 tournament, which will take place at IEM Sydney from Oct. 16 to 22, and should the organization decide to stick Aleksib, he can start afresh from there.
Daniel Ademiju Idowu
