Faker leads T1 to a win against Afreeca Freecs in week 7 of 2021 LCK Summer Split

Faker helped T1 secure a 2-1 series victory over Afreeca Freecs today in the seventh week of the 2021 LCK Summer Split.

Both MVP votes for today’s match went to Faker, who carried his team throughout this series on Ryze. He picked the champion in all three games and while he wasn’t able to carry his team to a victory in the second one, he still put up a good performance.

In the first game, he won his lane against his opponent’s Orianna before roaming to the side lanes with his ultimate and helping them get leads. In the third game, Faker laned against LeBlanc, a champion that’s been recently popping off in the meta. But he had no issues dealing with the assassin and scaled throughout the match before reaching his full build and taking over the game.

In the first game of today’s League of Legends series, T1 took a methodical approach, refusing to go for risky plays and instead focusing on reaching their power spikes while also picking up the first couple of drakes and Rift Heralds. Even though Afreeca tried to force a couple of skirmishes, T1 mostly backed away and focused on scaling instead. Once Faker and Gumayusi got their core items, it was lights out for Afreeca, who couldn’t survive the onslaught coming from a fed Ashe and Ryze.

Following a devastating loss after getting outscaled in the first match, Afreeca decided to play the scaling game in the next showdown, picking up Tristana, Zoe, and Aphelios—three champions that scale well in the later stages of the match—to try to deal with Faker’s Ryze. The plan worked wonders since Kiin got ahead on Tristana in the top lane and took over the game. T1 tried to go for a heroic play to close out the series but failed in the end because they lacked the damage to kill Tristana.

In the deciding game of today’s series, Faker won his lane and carried through the side lanes once again. His stellar ultimates on Ryze created huge opportunities for his teammates to flank or surprise their opponents as they tried to scatter in different directions and kept getting picked up. One of those ultimates happened toward the end of the game near the Baron, where Faker teleported in his jungler and support, who soaked up most of the damage while he, Canna, and Gumayusi unleashed a lot of damage onto their opponents.

Related: Here are the 2021 LCK Summer Split standings

T1 (8-5) climbed to third place in the LCK standings following this victory. The team got off to a poor start in the split but have bounced back in recent weeks after changing their coaching staff and bringing in Oner and Gumayusi for Cuzz and Teddy.

T1 will be back on the Rift on Saturday, July 24 with a match against Liiv SANDBOX, who have looked unstoppable in recent matches as well.

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