The new GODSENT roster was announced on August 15th, 2016, with Jesper “JW” Wecksell, Robin “flusha” Rönnquist, and Freddy “KRiMZ” Johansson joining the lineup. Initially, when the Swedish shuffle took place, many CS:GO analysts and experts felt that GODSENT got the better end of the deal. They were viewed as the more stable line up. The GODSENT line up has now played together for a month and the results do not look promising.
GODSENT’s Poor Results
After the trade, Fnatic kept the ESL Pro League spot, leaving GODSENT to try and qualify through the wild card match against Virtus.pro, which they failed to do. Despite not facing much top-tier competition online since their inception, GODSENT’s online results have been quite underwhelming. They failed to qualify for E-League Season 2, losing to an alternate aTTaX team who were viewed as heavy underdogs. They then lost quite convincingly to FaZe Clan at the ESL One New York qualifiers, who are not quite top-tier and suffer from inconsistency. Despite the very weak competition they have faced, GODSENT’s online results do not bode well.
Unfortunately for GODSENT, their troubles have extended into their offline play as well. They have only played two LANs since the new lineup came together, competing at StarLadder StarSeries Season 2 and the Gfinity CS:GO Invitational. Their overall map win-loss record at these two LANs was 2-6 and they failed to advance beyond the first stage of either tournament. Tallying up all of their best-of series, they are 0-2 at LAN and 6-5 overall if you include their online play. The team is not just losing one-off games, but is failing in series play as well and these results are even worse when considering the level of competition they have been exposed to.
The New, Old Roster
There are two ways to look at this GODSENT roster. They can be viewed as 4/5 of the 2015 Fnatic side who were arguably the best team of all time. However, THEY can also be viewed as 4/5 of the early 2014 Fnatic lineup that began to fall off and ended up removing two players, one of whom was Andreas “znajder” Lindberg who is back on this roster. Before joining up with GODSENT, KRiMZ and JW were in major slumps and were at the lowest points in their careers since becoming well known players. Both of these players, and flusha, have all been top ten players in the world at given periods, and with GODSENT lacking any serious fire power, one of them will have to step up. We have seen improved play from JW and flusha in this lineup, but it hasn’t been enough to get them over the hump. KRiMZ’s struggles have also continued and his play has been a detriment to the team. It also remains to be seen whether or not Markus “pronax” Wallsten’s in-game leading will prove effective with no star to carry the fragging load.
With the caveat that they have only been together for a month and have only shown slight improvement, GODSENT look to be in serious trouble. Multiple players have to improve their form and find some semblance of consistency if this line up is going to be successful. There may not be a replacement for Olof “olofmeister” Kajbjer Gustafsson in his prime, as the best player in the world, but GODSENT will have to find some way to fill that void.