Image: LoL Esports
Royal Never Give Up will advance to the Group Stage while DetonatioN FocusMe has been eliminated.
The final match of the Worlds 2022 Play-ins have decided the final team to advance to the Group Stage: Royal Never Give Up! RNG went up against DetonatioN FocusMe today in a decidedly imbalanced match, with the latter LJL team showing promise but ultimately unable to topple the sheer power GALA and Breathe bring to LPL’s RNG.
DFM came out swinging today by scoring an immediate win against RNG, which is no easy feat considering the latter MSI champions played very aggressively in this first match. Unfortunately, some of those riskier plays didn’t pay off and DFM was more than ready to double down on them. The MSI champions clearly weren’t expecting to lose their first match right off the bat, but levelled the playing field by winning the second match of the day, leading to a 1-1 tie as we’ve often seen in these best-of-five matches.
Evi was cool with it:
DFM didn’t get off to a good start in Game 3, dropping into a six-kill and 4k gold deficit by the lategame. The team was really dragging its feet towards the endgame here, with RNG sitting safely in undeniable superiority and applying pressure on turrets. DFM put up a valiant defense, but the war machine wasn’t slowing down and RNG ended up picking up every objective it took aim at. DFM simply couldn’t catch up despite its best efforts, and RNG took another win, going 2-1.
DFM’s back was now against the wall. It desperately needed a win in this next game to avoid being eliminated from the competition. Despite that, RNG held an almost immediate advantage here by sweeping the team away in early skirmishes and nabbing a dragon just six minutes in. We’ve seen RNG try to steamroll the competition early before in the Play-ins, but this time it felt like DFM just couldn’t put up any kind of meaningful opposition to slow the enemy down. Halfway through, we saw RNG go 9-1 in kills with a 7k gold lead, which made for quite an uphill battle for DFM in the lategame. RNG pushed through the enemy jungle into the enemy base and after a devastating teamfight for DFM, steamrolled the enemy to win the whole series.
Royal Never Give Up will now advance to the Group Stage of Worlds 2022, heading into Group D with 100 Thieves, Flying Oyster and Gen.G Esports. Fnatic joins Group A with Cloud9, T1 and EDward Gaming. In the earlier match of the day, we saw EG confirmed for Group B while GAM Esports has been confirmed for Group C.
