Three reasons why Clutch Gaming will or won’t win the League of Legends World Championship

Three reasons why Clutch won’t win worlds

1. Upset in play-ins

Clutch drew into Group A in play-ins with Unicorns of Love and Mammoth, which looks to be a good group for Clutch to finish first in. This is important because finishing in first place should give them a better shot to get to the group stage.

However, should they finish second, Clutch risks facing a team like Damwon or Splyce. These are two teams favored to finish first in their groups that could end Clutch’s run if they meet up in the knockout round of play-ins.  Though Clutch is pretty one of the favorites to make it to groups just as long as they play well and beat the teams they are supposed to beat.

2. Stiff competition beats them

Should Clutch get through play-ins the teams they’ll face will get much harder. Depending on the group will determine just how much harder they get. Luckily they avoid group A which is one of the harder groups with G2, Griffin and Cloud 9. They also avoid being grouped with Invictus, thanks to Team Liquid being grouped with them.

Group B would be a good draw with J-Team and GAM Esports, even if it does include FunPlus Phoenix. Their other possibility, Group C, on the other hand, would be tough.

SKT, Fnatic and RNG would await them if that’s the group they are placed into. Huni would get matches with two of his former teams, which would be something to watch. Yet I feel like Clutch isn’t prepared to handle such a star player packed group.

Jungler Nam “Lira” Tae-yoo would get outplayed by the likes of Kim “Clid” Tae-min” and Mads “Broxah” Brocks-Pedersen by a large margin as they are two of the best junglers in the world. While Lira is often considered the weakest link on Clutch and ranks as one of NA’s worst junglers, Cody Sun would have to deal with Park “Teddy” Jin-seong , Jian “Uzi” Zi-Hao and Martin “Rekkles” Larsson in the bottom lane, all of whom could neutralize Clutch’s strongest point on the map.

Meanwhile, Huni has to take on Gabriël “Bwipo” Rau, Xie “Langx” Zhen-Yingand and Kim “Khan” Dong-ha up top. There isn’t really any lane where Clutch has an advantage over anyone in this group.

If they do make a run out of groups. Team Liquid, G2, Griffin, Invictus, or FunPlus could all be waiting for them. Theres just way too many better teams out there for the team ranked 14th in our ranking list for worlds.

 3. Return to spring form

Spring Split 2019 seems so far away, yet just a few months ago this Clutch team sat at 5-13 and in ninth place in the LCS. They looked awful in the spring, giving their fans little to cheer about.  While they did turn it around in the summer, one can’t help but think how much of that improvement was them getting better, or the other teams in the LCS getting worse?

Like with Flyquest, Echo Fox and Golden Guardians all having worse splits and TSM dropping a couple more games in summer than spring, it seems like Clutch benefited a lot from the misfortune of others. Yes, they did win over a couple good teams, but is it enough to help the case?

I think there’s a possibility this spring team shows up. Given the level of talent in the field too it’s only going to get worse with mistakes being magnified even more. Clutch won’t be getting away with stuff against upper region top talent like they did against bottom tier LCS teams. If that’s the case it’s going to be a short run at worlds for Clutch.

The run at Worlds depends mostly on how much this team lives up to their name and performs in the Clutch. The question is, can they keep the magic going?

The League of Legends World Championship begins October 2 at 7:00 EST / 13:00 CEST.