Spirit won the CIS derby in straightforward fashion as Aleksib’s terrible record in best-of-five grand finals continued to expand unabated. With this result, donk and co. became the only team to win two top-tier events so far in 2024.
The winners of IEM Katowice and the first CS2 Major clashed for all the marbles in the grand final of the BLAST Premier Spring Finals in a marquee matchup, the first time the tournament featured a best-of-five format for its ultimate decider.
NAVI beat out FaZe and Astralis in the group stage to earn a straight shot to the semifinals, where they took down Virtus.pro to qualify for the grand final. Team Spirit also had a similarly straightforward way to the match, defeating G2 and VP to top their group and beating out Team Vitality in the other semifinal match, setting up a mouthwatering clash.
NAVI IGL Aleksib has a torrid record in best-of-five grand finals in Counter-Strike when helming top teams, with not even a single map won on his last five separate attempts across multiple orgs and roster iterations. However, with a Major win under his belt, the Finn has seemingly answered many questions—many of which will no doubt return now after another straightforward and devastating defeat.
In a series that was much more one-sided than the scorelines would suggest, Team Spirit were hot off the presses with a 6-0 start on Ancient to kick off the grand final, racing to a 10-2 lead soon after. While the Major winners were able to close the gap, they were never in touching distance on the opener, which ended 13-9 as donk gleefully played the villain role in front of a NAVI-supporting crowd.
Spirit had a similarly strong start on NAVI’s pick of Dust 2, but this time, their opponents were able to bounce back from a 0-5 start to just a 5-6 deficit. It wasn’t enough in the end, as chopper got the better of Aleksib with his T side calls to put his team in a dominant position.
NAVI scored a dominant win on Mirage with a 13-4 scoreline and kept up with a close start on Nuke with a respectable five rounds on the T side, but Spirit’s dominant offense only dropped one round in the second half as they closed out the series with a 13-6 win off the back of heroics from zont1x and donk, including a pistol round quad-kill.
With this victory, Team Spirit became the only team to win two different top-tier events in the 2024 season so far, with NAVI winning the Major, FaZe taking down IEM Chengdu, MOUZ defending their ESL Pro League title, and G2 completing a Cinderella run in Dallas. It’s a close affair at the highest levels of elite CS2, and the only thing we can be sure of right now is that donk will put on a show, no matter the match.
