Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov has been one of the most exciting prospects to watch ever since his beginnings on NAVI Junior and now the best of NAVI’s main roster can’t even lay a finger on the teenager.
The 17-year-old’s performance against the three-time best player of the year, Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, stood out amongst a collection of top-tier performances from G2’s match against NAVI. Fans geared up to watch a back-and-forth battle between two of the best AWPers in the game, but the encounter didn’t unfold in the way players predicted.
According to statistics from HLTV, m0NESY beat s1mple in every single head-to-head duel they had. The youngster killed s1mple 13 times without dying once and topped the leaderboard with a 1.56 rating across the two maps.
NAVI’s showstopper, however, couldn’t break past a 1.00 rating. The AWPer finished the best-of-three sitting on a 0.95 rating, a far cry from s1mple’s usual numbers.
G2 has breezed past NAVI in the IEM Katowice 2023 group stage, booking themselves a spot in the semi-finals of the $1 million tournament. G2 took NAVI down 2-0, beating them 16-8 on Inferno and 16-7 on Nuke.
While G2’s form has been immaculate since the beginning of the year, this battle was not expected to be so one-sided. This match now adds to G2’s winning streak, bringing it to 17 map victories in a row.
There’s still time for s1mple to come back and take revenge if NAVI and G2 meet in the grand final. However, the foundation for that matchup isn’t set just yet.
