After a rough Day 4 at the 2022 Mid-Season Invitational, fastPay Wildcats were officially eliminated from the tournament after their loss against RED Canids.
The loss put the Wildcats on 0-3 on the day and 1-4 overall at MSI. With RNG and PSG Talon both having three wins apiece, IW could only reach two wins even if they win their last game against RNG, making it statistically impossible for the team to advance.
In an elimination match against RED Canids, IW fell flat and let their opponents run all over them. The game didn’t have any kills until the eight-minute mark, but from that point on, RED Canids were relentless. In just eight minutes past that mark, RED Canids went from zero kills to 13. IW went from zero to zero. At one point, RED Canids were up 15-0 in kills.
The game ended with RED Canids racking up 31 kills in a 30-minute game, averaging more than a kill per minute. RED Canids’ jungler Gabriel Vinicius “Aegis” Saes de Lemos had an unreal game on Lee Sin, earning a 15/1/9 kills/deaths/assists score line. Daniel “Grevthar” Xavier was the other main carry in that game, going 5/1/16 on Zoe.
The team will now likely end the group stage with a 1-5 record — the same record the Wildcats earned at last year’s MSI 2021. IW came into last year’s events as one of the contenders to get out of Group B, but they fell flat, just like this year.
Turkey first rose to prominence as a minor region at MSI 2016 when it defeated all the other wildcard regions at the 2016 International Wildcard Invitational. Then the region managed to make it into the group stage at the 2017 League of Legends World Championship, when Fenerbahçe Esports managed to make it through the play-in stage. Since, then Turkey has not been able to repeat its success and has failed to advance at every international tournament they have competed at.
As for RED Canids, they do have meaningful games left to be played but will need to defeat RNG on Saturday to keep their hopes of advancing alive.
