It doesn’t get much easier than that, does it? Vitality are your ESL Pro League Season 21 champions, taking down MOUZ in a 3:0 series that never even had the illusion of being competitive. It’s yet another notch in the Intel Grand Slam race for Vitality, who look set to take home the $1,000,000 prize at some point in the coming months.
I’m going to try and dissect how this went down as best as I can, reflecting on a series that was only ever one-way traffic.
Vitality storm the best-of-five
Credit: ESL
Nine. Four. Five. That’s the number of rounds MOUZ mustered on each map in the ESL Pro League Grand Final. They didn’t manage double digits once, and seemed to only get worse as the series progressed. Vitality got the job done in a professional manner, never letting standards slip, even as it became obvious to all who this trophy was going to.
For so much of this event, Vitality have leaned on ZywOo and flameZ for their star power in matches. But here, when it mattered most, everyone on this lineup stepped up big time. Let’s look at the scorelines of the Vitality players for the series:
- mezii (42-26)
- ZywOo (43-34)
- flameZ (43-33)
- ropz (45-37)
- apEX (45-40)
Those are some remarkable numbers, right? Across the board, the team were fairly even, and it barely felt like they got out of first gear in this one. A true team effort if I ever saw one.
Vitality look unbeatable at the moment
Credit: ESL
This is Counter-Strike, and as we all know, nothing lasts forever. But right now, there can be no argument that Team Vitality are the best CS2 team in the world at the moment. Maybe Spirit were in the mix earlier this year, but their lows are simply too low at the moment to really stake that claim. Not with a Vitality this consistent.
Has a one-man change ever made this level of impact on a team before? Losing Spinx and signing ropz was a real game-changer for the scene, and ESL Pro League could be small fry for what this team could go on to achieve.
There’ll be no rest for Vitality, though, with the team heading to BLAST Open Spring 2025 in just a few days. It’s tough at the top.