North has removed sniper Jakob “JUGi” Hansen from its active CS:GO roster.
The Danish organization revealed its newest jersey for 2020 earlier today. Mathias “MSL” Lauridsen’s name was featured on one of the jerseys and he’s now officially been announced to be returning to North after JUGi’s benching.
It makes sense that JUGi is the one being cut since he never really flourished under North’s colors. He’s been playing for North since May 2019 and helped the team win DreamHack Open Sevilla in December. But he’s struggled individually since he was brought in from OpTic Gaming and finished his stint with only a 0.98 rating on LAN in the last six months, according to HLTV.
Graham “messioso” Pitt, North’s head of esports operations, said that JUGi’s benching is an unfortunate necessity to restore balance to the team.
In MSL’s announcement, he said that North presented a project that he truly believes in. “I believe we can do incredible things, though I do not expect us to do miracles from day 1, we need to get to work and find each other in and outgame,” MSL said.
Although MSL has been inactive since October when OpTic disbanded, he’s an instant upgrade to JUGi since he plays well with the AWP and he’ll be leading the squad instead of Nicklas Gade, North’s caller for the last few months.
MSL was a part of the Dignitas squad that left the North American organization to create North in January 2017. Although that squad was inconsistent most of the time, he led North to win several DreamHack tournaments, including DreamHack Masters Stockholm in September 2018 when North outplayed Astralis in the grand finals and MSL was elected the MVP.
North will make their debut under MSL’s leadership at DreamHack Open Leipzig next week.
