League of Legends MSI: Three reasons Liquid was lucky to beat Phong Vũ Buffalo
By Josh Tyler
Team Liquid took down Phong Vũ Buffalo, but here’s why the League of Legends representatives from NA should be concerned.
Liquid (“TL”) managed to complete a sweep of Phong Vũ Buffalo (“PVB”) this morning, advancing to the main stage of the MSI tournament. While the North American League of Legends representatives were expected to beat the Vietnamese representatives, the results don’t bear out one simple fact: Liquid was lucky to win.
During the series, Liquid made a lot of crucial mistakes that PVB wasn’t able to capitalize on. Jake “Xmithie” Puchero got massively outplayed early by a clearly inferior jungler. Jo “CoreJJ” Yong-in threw away reckless deaths. Yet Liquid was still able to get a clean sweep.
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Already, the rumblings have started about how sloppy Liquid looked in their first international showing since last year’s disappointment at Worlds. There were a lot of issues commentators have pointed to on the Liquid side that are concerning, but in watching this game I was more focused on the massive mistakes Phong Vũ Buffalo made, and why Liquid can’t rely on those same mistakes against harder competition.
PVB threw leads
In almost every single game of this series, Phong Vũ Buffalo got a significant gold lead either as a team or in a key match-up around the map. They heavily outplayed TL, especially jungler Xmithie, in the early game in every single game. Luckily for Liquid, PVB did something incredibly risky, dumb, or both and threw away that advantage in each of the three games.
In Game 1, the match was relatively even for the first 17 minutes or so, with each team trading blows, until a huge team fight around Ocean Drake resulted in Liquid getting aced blowing open a 1.5k gold lead for PVB, the biggest of the game at that point. But, just six minutes later, the team overcommitted to taking the third Ocean Drake away from Liquid and instead of retreating after being poked down to half health, stupidly re-engaging the fight after mid laner Võ “Naul” Thành Luân went in on a suicide mission to deal no damage. Liquid took two kills, got Baron, reclaimed the gold lead, and took all that momentum to a win.
The next game, PVB actually got out to that 1.5k gold lead much earlier, around the 12-minute mark, and looked to have control of the game. Then, they made an ill-fated attempt to dive Jung “Impact” Eon-yeong with three men (four if you count Naul who first wandered off then came back way later). Credit to Impact, he massively outplayed them, but PVB went in way too early (there was no minion wave at the turret) and mechanically botched the dive allowing Liquid to collapse in plenty of time, get two kills, get the first tower, and even up the gold.
Finally, in Game 3, Phong Vũ Buffalo got their mid and bot lanes massively ahead thanks to a well-executed dive. However, PVB made some massive misplays including jungler Hoàng “Meliodas” Tiến Nhật getting picked around Rift Herald, an awful teleport in the middle of a fight by Naul, and Phạm “Zeros” Minh Lộc trying to save both from their mistakes. In the span of about one minute, PVB’s 1k gold lead swung to a 1.5k deficit.