Reason Female have taken 2nd place in the first Ladies
After skipping round 1 thanks to a bye, the girls were sent straight to the quarter finals, where they faced SFTO eSports winning 16-10. Game 2 was a close one, going into over time with our girls eventually winning 19-16 and heading straight into the finals to face n!faculty.
The Reason girls then lost out to the ladies from n!faculty in a close final, narrowly losing 16-14.
Team captain Abi ‘Abiii’ Glover had this to say:
“With ESWC in just under two weeks time for us in Reason Gaming CSGO Female, we decided to take part in the ESL Ladies ♥ CSGO Cup #1 on Sunday. We decided to take this opportunity to begin to practice against other female teams alike – after the past few months we made the decision to focus our practice against mixed teams in other leagues and ladders, to get a good all round idea of our skill and play as a team, rather than focusing our minds on just playing against other Female teams and working ourselves towards them.
With the games starting early in the day, we managed to squeeze in a warmup game before the Cup began, but then only to find that we had a ‘Bye’ in Round One, which would carry us through into Round 2, the Quarter-Final.
With a nice mix of female teams from across Europe, in Round 2, we came up against ‘SFTO eSports’ – a German team of players, who we would play on the map de_inferno. Winning knife round, we started CT, taking the first 3 pistol rounds with ease! Then making a silly mistake of being too aggressive on the first buy round for the SFTO ladies, this then altered the CT half for us now. Now having to waste 2 rounds in a row eco’ing, our moment was low, and we started to lose round after round, with SFTO taking the next 7 rounds in a row, bringing it now to 3-7 to them.
Kicking our minds into gear, we didn’t want to go defeated in our first official game against another female team; we stepped up our game, taking the final 5 rounds, to win the half 8-7.
After a nice pistol round from ‘Salah’, we started our next half with great morale, only losing 2 or 3 silly rounds, we came back strong in our T half winning it 8-3 and winning the game now 16-10 and taking us into the Semi-Final.
Next up we would face a Russian team – ‘oDAA’ and once again on de_inferno. Starting CT again, we struggled now to hold down the sites against the Russian ladies. With them taking the first 3 rounds pistol rounds this game, our first buy round was important, which we were able to win, and it secured us two rounds.
In the 5th round ‘oDAA’ secured A site, making it impossible for us to retake. They began to steal away the rounds, now making it 3-8 to them. With a strike of the awp down middle from ‘Abi’, we then began to take back rounds, losing the half now only 7-8.
We started T half strongly again, aiming to take as many rounds as we could. It was evenly matched throughout, with a few technical problems for one of their players, we continued the match forward. It was a hard game for both teams, and after making some execution errors in our strats, the Russian ladies won the last few rounds, taking the match into overtime, which we were then able to win 4-1 to secure the game and take us up into the Final.
In the Final our opponents would be the German team – ‘n!Faculty.JustGirls’.
After the map veto, it was decided that we would be playing de_mirage_csgo, the least played of all the maps, so we knew that it would be a challenge! With having such a mixture of players, our server being French and theirs being German, it was decided that both servers would be used and we would swap at half time to make the game more fair.
First half, the n!Faculty girls started T side, while we were set to hold CT side. The n!Faculty girls came out strong, with a mixture of tactics from them and easily adapting against our play style. It seemed no matter what we tried to do, they stood strong on T side, taking over the sites and making it hard for us to retake them. They took the first half of the game 11-4!
After a server switch, and a little bit of a team talk, we came back fighting strong, we knew that we had to bring this game back, and without using our set strats for the map, we tried to play with what was working for us – and we played for as many rounds as we could against their setup!
The match finally came down to the wire, 10-4 on CT side to Reason Gaming Female, and both teams needing the round, us for the draw and them for the win. Once again we made some silly mistakes, and with the n!Faculty girls playing aggressive, they took the final round to win the match 16-14.
We were happy achieving 2nd in this cup! Again just like Epsilan we didn’t look at it as trying to place high, we wanted to understand what competition female teams will bring to us, and we wanted to build again our team strength together, and learning to adapt to other teams play. It’s given us a lot to think about and a good understanding of what we need to do in the last week to be as ready as we can for ESWC. 🙂
Congratulations to the n!Faculty girls and thank you to the other teams who gave us a great cup to participate in! Thank you to ESL 😀 we will hopefully be playing in more of their cups to follow!”
We’re very proud of the girls here at Reason and can’t wait to see them rock the ESWC next week!
