After being knocked out of the upper bracket early on, Team Liquid have found their stride as they locked in a top three finish at the MDL Disneyland Paris Major today.
With the Dota Pro Circuit season coming to a close, this last push was key for their spot in the standings heading toward The International 2019.
The European squad bested paiN Gaming and Vici Gaming early in their lower bracket run. Their match against Vici was tightly contested but ended with Liquid getting a much-needed boost to both their DPC ranking and confidence as they matched up with OG in round four.
OG had a solid showing in the group stage and their short upper bracket stint. But when they matched up against a team that had momentum on their side, things got out of hand quickly. OG were on top of things in game one, but even after picking up a win, they failed to close out the series.
OG held a strong advantage after game one. As they pushed deep into Liquid’s territory, however, Amer “Miracle” Al-Barkawi waited for the perfect moment to strike and help his team turn things around. That evened the series up and allowed Liquid to run things back in a third game.
Miracle’s play carried over into game three as he managed to pull off two rampages in close succession to help his team win the series 2-1.
Liquid moved on to face LGD Gaming to see who would go out in fourth place. The series was hotly contested from the start. LGD had a chance to pull things out early in game one, but their lineup was built for quick conflict rather than the late game and Liquid capitalized on that. One strong late game push secured the win and a 1-0 lead for Liquid.
Game two was almost the opposite of that as LGD had some late decisive teamfights to even the series. All of that led to a decisive game three where Liquid looked in control. Up until the 20-minute mark, Liquid had the lead in kills and was slowly pushing toward a win with that advantage.
But LGD pulled off some incredible teamfights that ended up evening the resources after they forced multiple buybacks and had Miracle almost dead to rights in several skirmishes. That wasn’t enough, though. During one of those fights, Ivan Borislavov “MinD_ContRoL” Ivanov popped off and helped Miracle get back into the game.
From there, it was a slow push through until they took the Ancient and secured the win. With this victory, Liquid secured a top three finish at MDL Disneyland and became the seventh team to lock in a spot at TI9.
They’ll have a rematch against Evil Geniuses, the team that sent them into the lower bracket, in the lower bracket finals on May 11 at 6am CT. The winner of that match will go on to face Team Secret in the grand finals.
