MSI 2019: When Team Liquid made the world believe

2019 was a magical year for esports. Well, more specifically, it was a magical year for Team Liquid. Our CS roster was putting on its best performance ever, our PUBG roster had found its footing, Hungrybox was in his third year of topping the Melee rankings… and then there was our League of Legends team at MSI, having the best run NA has ever had at an international tournament, and one of the biggest upsets in League history.

For years, League had been one of TL’s marquee products. Co-CEO Steve Arhancet came up from the earliest days of League, when its potential was unrealized and its competitive scene was messy enough to be reality TV. He started as a pro Support player and for years was the team’s de facto GM when it wasn’t clear where any of it led — but by 2019, everything had changed. There was no ceiling.

The only thing was, for as much as Liquid (or Curse) loved League, League did not seem to love us back. We spent years not just losing, but losing dramatically — and I mean this literally. It wasn’t that we were a godawful team (we rarely were), but more that most of our years were the stuff of Shakespearean drama: reverse sweeps, sudden roster shifts, mental breakdowns, superstars and prodigies turned divas… prior to 2017, Team Liquid’s legacy was more about these false starts and dramatic endings than it was about winning. 

So what changed? Just when Liquid had hit rock bottom with a roster that was imploding right before a tournament that could relegate the team from the league, we found a silver lining. TSM, far and away the best team back then — how distant this all seems now, huh? — lent us their star player, Doublelift. He ended up enjoying Liquid as a team enough that in the next year, he helped us build a super team.

The next two years whizzed by like one great golden blur. We seized four domestic titles, back-to-back-to-back-to-back, after years of faltering seasons and fourth-place finishes. In those years, LCS splits were either steamrolls or epic sagas where we always seemed to come out on top. What was missing, though, were the international titles. 

To be clear and honest: for NA, the international titles were always missing — and are still missing. But TL wasn’t just failing to get titles; we were struggling to even make a dent, and if we’re being honest, our primary rival (Cloud9) often performed much better internationally. It got to a point where, when the team went to MSI after winning the LCS for a third time, there were some LCS fans that wished TSM or Cloud9 had made it instead.

With Jensen in the mid lane and CoreJJ in support, there was some sparse hope that MSI 2019 would be different. At the start, though, it felt like more of the same, with the team only narrowly getting out of Groups and getting 0-2ed by both the Korean (SKT) and Chinese (iG) squads. When the playoff draws happened and Team Liquid got Invictus Gaming, it really felt like the same story in a different year.

Now, you may have heard people rewrite history to make Invictus Gaming out as a worse team than they were, but don’t buy that. This team had historic carry talent, had freshly come off of winning Worlds 2018, and cleaned house in LPL Spring to qualify for MSI. In Groups of the event, they went 9-1 and only lost to SKT. Headed into playoffs, there was every reason to believe that iG vs TL was a foregone conclusion and their only real opposition was SKT; it would be an understatement to call iG the heavy favorites.

But headed into the series, Doublelift and the team were unusually calm. To most, this read as nothing more than the signature arrogance of NA’s champion carry — but there was more behind it. If iG had any weaknesses, it was their tendency to push their advantages too far, too early, as well as their bot lane. Liquid, on the hand, was built around their bot lane and punishing their opponent’s mistakes and overextensions.

It was my first year working with Team Liquid as a freelance writer, and I remember staying up late into the night to watch this series. I remember being so careful with my hopes, so guarded with my expectations. When the team lost a fight in mid lane and went down 4,000 gold — I hoped for the best, but wasn’t expecting much. This is how NA always loses, after all. But then, iG wasn’t careful. Their players lined up for Impact’s Neeko. TL turned the fight, clawed back into the game, and won.

In game 2, the same thing happened — iG took off to a big lead, but Team Liquid had a strong late game comp that could fight well over objectives. Once again, they exploited iG’s mistakes to make a comeback. At this point, everyone was feeling it: was it really happening? Were we about to beat the best team in the world? I still had trouble believing it. When iG corrected themselves in game 3 and never gave up the lead, I’d already started comforting myself over the reverse sweep. (“Well, at least they put up a fight!”)

Only the reverse sweep never came. Against all odds, Liquid took control of the game early and never gave it up. They didn’t just win that last match — they beat iG badly enough that they proved that they were undisputedly the better team on that day. It seemed, in that moment, like the sky was the limit. It seemed like we could win it all.

You probably know, though, what’s coming next. You probably know that on the other side of the bracket, G2 would go on to upset SKT, and that despite it looking like NA’s best shot at an international title in years, we would not only lose to G2, but lose so badly that we’d set a record for the fastest Grand Finals in League history. (Well, at least I got to bed early.)

Because of the shellacking, and because this is an MSI, people tend to forget what this moment meant. I can’t blame them. The whiplash of going from zero to hero to zero again was so great that it washed damn near every other narrative away. It made people rewrite history, made people act like iG’s 2019 decline was guaranteed and had started right at MSI (even though, again, they sat 9-1 in Groups). It made people act like the win didn’t have them talking about how the West had finally closed the gap. 

People felt embarrassed for believing in TL, and, once the LCK and LPL got back into gear, for believing in Western teams at all. We all corrected our hindsight so it was properly 20/20 and wrote this off as a fluke. 

I don’t think that was the right lesson, though. I think the right lesson was that there’s always room to hope for the best, to get swept up in the moment, to let yourself be convinced that everything is possible, to let yourself get hurt more than you’d like to admit when it all goes belly-up. The right lesson is to understand that none of this is a fluke, an aberration: it’s the game as intended.

Sometimes, I think NA fans forget that this isn’t a storybook. It’s a sport, and you are the underdog. It’s supposed to hurt, most of the time. And it’s supposed to mean so much more whenever it doesn’t. Everyone else can write off our successes as anomalies, but it’s our responsibility to hold on to what they felt like in the moment, and to believe that they can come again.