Defending the home turf: Grubby, Naniwa and Welmu at WCS Season 2

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We’re absolutely obliged to start with Grubby when talking about the European clique at the Season 2 finals. It’s true that he’s likely not the best and most accomplished player of them all, especially in the company of Naniwa who has a silver from DreamHack Shockholm and bronze at MLG Spring this year alone. Neither was he the biggest surprise of WCS Europe as he comes behind Welmu in that regard, the Fin only known for his prowess in minor smaller tournaments and his gold medal at the all-Finnish Assembly Winter ’13.

What makes Grubby vastly more interesting and enticing than any other European player is his enormous eSports backstory combined with almost no good tournament runs in StarCraft 2. The Dutchman has been struggling to make his broad fan base happy ever since he switched but bar his IEM Singapore silver medal last year he’s always been a mid-class player, leading to the invention of the famous “Grubby line” and the “always the crowd, never the tournament favorite” phrase we GosuGamers writers often use to describe him.

But now there’s another Grubby flying to Germany, different than anything we’ve seen from him before. He has the unprecedented for his career momentum from WCS Europe top four and the victories over ForGG, Mvp and Vortix. He’s carried on the tidal wave of thundering cheers and will likely be the player applauded the loudest for any eventual successes this weekend. He’s confident, he’s playing a game which suits him better than WoL and it could be said he has a real chance of making playoffs.

To his bad luck, his group is crushingly strong. His opening match is against Bomber who recently blanked First at WCS Korea and, at least from the looks of it, seems to be in top form. His next opponent will either be WCS America champion Polt – a player with 84% TvP win-rate with eleven-map win streak – or First who he’d have to beat in a PvP which is not exactly amongst Grubby’s strengths.

Yet despite everything said, there’s still hope for the Dutchman, something that would be unusual otherwise. If Mvp and ForGG can be beaten, then Bomber can be beaten too (Polt probably cannot be but it’s hardly Grubby’s fault). Additionally, PvPs can still go in bizarre directions and if Grubby can take a game off of Duckdeok after being stupidly behind in supply and relying on a ninja expansion then he can overcome First also.

Photo: ESL
 

Bringing along all the hype and praises around his persona elevating him to a Stephano 2.0 in Europe, Naniwa flies to Germany for his biggest challenge yet. A challenge that has nothing to do with the strength or renown of his opponents – although those are certainly worthy of pointing out, the Swede has been in similar situations before – but with testing Naniwa’s own psyche by throwing his way a myriad of situations he would really like to avoid.

If the stakes and pressure were not high enough already, the opening game of the Swede has the potential to absolutely ruin every match-up he’s to play from there on now. At 18:00 CET, Naniwa enters to booth to play Europe’s reigning champion Duckdeok, the player that destroyed him in the WCS quarter finals and who then beat two more Protosses to raise the trophy. Having in mind Naniwa’s history of being negatively affected by losses to the point of absurd in-game and in-reality actions, the Swede needs to open with a victory more than anything because another crushing loss would end him before he plays his next matches, I fear.

It could be argued that Naniwa is professional enough to not succumb to rash emotional decisions in a tournament of this magnitude and I do want to believe so. He knows that the local crowd will be tightly behind him, supporting his every click. He knows that, realistically speaking, he is Europe’s biggest chance for a playoffs finish. But he should also know that he would need every sliver of confidence and every millimeter of an advantage if he is to survive Group C.

Because Duckdeok is just the beginning and hard as it might be, it only gets worse from there. Next to him sits Taeja, a player who had TvP as his best match-up in Wings of Liberty by a large margin and absolutely nothing has changed with the new game. What’s more, Taeja hasn’t lost a BoX TvP since his 1-2 to Elfi at DreamHack Summer and short of his semi-final loss in WCS America, he’s one the his way to repeat the “Summer of Taeja” from 2012.

Finally, there’s Innovation, the defending seasonal champion, the player still considered by many to be the best player in the world and the Terran who’s brought his TvP to the ridiculous 80%. And this is Innovation on a regular day. The Innovation that’s at the Season 2 finals is an Innovation who was just 4-0’d by a kid and was barred from making his third WCS grand finals in a row. It’s one very, very determined Innovation who will not allow group stage elimination and who’s come to smash puny humans as anger management.

Photo: ESL
 

Finally, there’s Welmu, the least accomplished player of the sixteen whose biggest enemy won’t be the richest player in StarCraft or the OSL champion, or the BroodWar bonjwa but the very grandeur of the stage he’ll be playing on.

One would think this is an overstatement but it really isn’t. All throughout his career, Welmu has been competing in the comfort of smaller tournaments, online cups or closed studio matches. Being uprooted from this confined soil and thrown in the open before the roaring cheers of thousand fans who expect you to do well against f*****g MC is something vastly different and unfamiliar for the Fin.

There really is no bigger nightmare for Welmu because if we take out the stage factor and examine his Group A match-ups without interfering context, we will see that the NrS Protoss actually has decent shot at surviving the round of sixteen. He might’ve lost to MC with a blank 0-3 in WCS Europe but he did manage to slap Duckdeok in the previous round and PvP is still his most consistently strong match-up. At the same time, Rain has been struggling in the mirror in both individual and team leagues and Jaedong’s ZvP has always been his Achilles’ heel, though it’s been getting stronger the past weeks.

As a result, for Welmu it really is all about playing these names on this particular stage. If he allows himself to be overwhelmed by outside factors he’ll be done but if he somehow manages to isolate himself from everything and think of the game and the game only there is hope, if only a sliver of it.    

More WCS Season 2 coverage:

Coverage hub
Korea goes to Cologne: An overview of the WCS Korea contingent
Alone amidst the wolves: Scarlett at WCS Season 2 finals

Rotator photo: ESL