Fly, Fly, Phoenix, Fly!
Image banner via lolesports
Amidst the deafening roar of the G2 Esports-sided crowd inside the Accorhotels Arena in Paris, France last night for the much-awaited best-of-five grand finals of the 2019 League of Legends World Championship, FunPlus Phoenix successfully emerged with the elusive Summoner’s Cup after a dominating 3-0 sweep against the European fan favorites.
It was as if the official theme song of the 2019 League of Legends World Championship—Phoenix—was written for the annual tournament’s eventual champion. FPX had a pretty decent tournament run, but it wasn’t the one without a couple of downs. They started their Worlds 2019 campaign with a tough loss against Taiwan’s J Team before finding their stride and eventually ending the group stages on the upper half of the standings with a 4-2 win-loss record.
With a spot in the playoffs secured, FPX found themselves facing a greater obstacle. They needed to potentially defeat both of last year’s grand finalists—Fnatic, as well as the defending Summoner’s Cup holder and co-League of Legends Pro League team, Invictus Gaming—if ever they wanted to become the next world champion. Though both adversaries weren’t able to pose much of a threat against their tournament life, firmly establishing that they are indeed a championship calibre squad, FunPlus Phoenix still entered the grand finals as an underdog compared to G2 Esports.
The Samurais were one championship title away from a grand slam after winning all major tournaments that they joined prior to the Worlds 2019, including both splits of the League of Legends European Championships, as well as the Mid-Season Invitational, where they won the fastest best-of-five grand finals ever played in professional League of Legends against North America’s Team Liquid. In addition to a successful season, their convincing victory against SK Telecom T1, objectively the most successful League of Legends team in history, in the semifinals obviously didn’t help convince majority of the world regarding the Chinese squad’s capabilities to claim this year’s Summoner’s Cup.
The moment FPX stepped on the grand stage of the AccorHotels Arena, however, none of the crowd’s cheers mattered. They played to win, with or without the crowd, the panel, or even the rest of the world’s approval.
“I don’t think that this really [affected] our players. For the entire year, it seems to be like there were always more people supporting our opponents than supporting us. But with our results and with our hard work we want to prove ourselves to people and make them like us. I think sometimes that this is actually even motivation for us,” Chen “WarHorse” Ju-Chich, FunPlus Phoenix’s head coach, stated.
The G2 that eliminated League of Legends Champions Korea’s last hope was far from the G2 that showed up in the grand finals. Rasmus “Caps” Borregaard failed to clap, a meme derived from his in-game name that is used whenever he owns the game, his lane counterpart, Kim “Doinb” Tae-sang. Luka “Perkz” Perković’s playful banter about setting the second-fastest grand finals and Doinb not being the second-best mid lane player also blew up in his face when FPX finished them in less than a hundred minute.
Hoisting the coveted Summoner’s Cup with zero deaths to his name in the entire best-of-five bout, Gao “Tian” Tian-Liang was rightfully crowned as the grand finals’ most valuable player. FPX’s Jungler finished with 5.1 KDA ratio and an impressive 72.7% kill participation at the 15-minute mark of the game, among other impressive statistics.
Congratulations to Tian of @FPX_Esports for winning the 2019 World Championship Finals MVP Presented by @oppo! #Worlds2019 pic.twitter.com/RX6HYgMxuY
— LoL Esports (@lolesports) November 10, 2019
“Before the games happened, we predicted a 3-1 victory. We didn’t expect that we would be able to win 3-0. So, I must say that my team performed very well. G2 is a team that we’ve had a lot of scrims against, and we won the majority of them. I feel that we did pretty well,” Doinb, who almost decided to retire prior to this year’s competitive season, answered when asked about beating G2 in the grand finals.
With the fall of the most decorated Korean Dynasty and the FPX’s victory, the second-straight World championship going into the way of an LPL representative, it’s becoming safe to say that the competitive League of Legends scene is shifting to a new dynasty—the Chinese Dynasty.
