North American League of Legends fans have only started to breathe again after the end of the fourth day of the 2021 World Championship group stage. The dust has settled and after a whole day of furious competition, only Korea’s DWG KIA and NA’s Cloud9 are left standing to enter the event’s knockout stage.
For the defending world champions, it was a relatively straightforward affair. They didn’t even drop a single game through the second round robin, taking down FunPlus Phoenix, Rogue, and C9 to secure the No. 1 seed out of Group A. C9 were actually their closest game by far today, with the LCS third seed showing incredible poise in the face of intense pressure.
For the rest of the teams, however, things were just getting started. With all three of the remaining representatives ending the group stage with a 2-4 record, they had to play a set of tiebreaker best-of-ones to decide the final team to move on to the knockout stage from this group.
First, FPX faced off against Rogue after having lost three games in a row for the day. They looked disjointed as a team in most of their matches and failed to show what made them look so deadly during the 2021 season. Superstar mid laner Doinb tried his best to carry his team to victory, but their lack of cohesion led to mistimed engages and other uncharacteristic mistakes.
The 2019 world champions eventually fell to Rogue in a stunning upset, sending the Europeans to a fateful showdown against C9. This was a matchup that’s long been overdue between two perpetual rival regions.
It was always meant to be. One last match between Rogue and C9 to decide who survives the supposed “Group of Death,” makes it to the knockout stage, and, ultimately, solidifies their place as the superior region—at least for the day. And after a 53-minute slugfest that had both fan bases searching for oxygen, C9 came out on top. This was also the first time that an NA team has won a tiebreaker in the Worlds group stage.
If you missed the day’s events, you might want to catch the VODs because these were some games to remember. The group stage isn’t done yet, though. There are still three more days to go, and if they’re anything like today, we might need to keep emergency services on standby.
Worlds 2021 will be back with Group B action tomorrow starting at 6am CT.
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