After Team Spirit won IEM Katowice back in February, people were so amazed by Danil “donk” Kryshkovets’ performance that they expected to see an era of dominance similar to that of Astralis or FaZe Clan. But Spirit weren’t ready to conquer the world yet.
At the Copenhagen Major, they were eliminated in the quarterfinals by FaZe Clan. At BetBoom Dacha Belgrade, they lost the Grand Final against MOUZ. At IEM Dallas, they were stopped in the semifinals by Vitality.
Going into BLAST Premier Spring Final, Spirit had a lot to prove. Everyone knew they would win the group stage but the expectation was that they would lose in the semifinals. Instead of choking, this time Spirit recovered after a disastrous start and went on to win the entire event.
Team Spirit’s Matches
In the group stage of BLAST Premier Spring Final, Spirit started with a 2 – 1 result against G2 Esports. Losing the first map against a team that plays with the coach as a stand-in is a bad sign. But somehow, donk and his crew managed to ignore this failure and won the next two maps with ease.
In the second match, played against Virtus.pro, the situation was quite different. Spirit started with a clear victory on Ancient (4 – 13) but struggled to win on Dust II (11 – 13).
Once again, the best player on the server was donk, who had so many excellent map results that he ended up winning the MVP award for the entire tournament.
The playoffs started poorly for Team Spirit, who lost the first half of Mirage 2 – 10 against one of the favorites. In the second half, however, they nearly completed an epic comeback. The final score was 11 – 13. Vitality won but what happened left them a bit demoralized.
On Dust II and Anubis, Spirit no longer gave them an easy start and the results were much better: 13 – 9, 13 – 9. Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut played well but received too little support from the other Vitality players.
The Grand Final was expected to end quickly because Spirit looked significantly stronger than Natus Vincere. But Justinas “jL” Lekavicius actually gave them a run for their money.
The scores were 9 – 13 on Ancient, 9 – 13 on Dust II, 13 – 4 on Mirage, and 6 – 13 on Nuke. Without donk’s 73 – 57 score, this could have easily been a Na’Vi victory.
