Going into Saturday’s NA VCT Stage Two matches, Sentinels fans were hoping for a win against the 2022 Masters Reykjavík champions OpTic, with the team barely hanging on to hope of advancing out of groups.
Unfortunately, barely two hours before the scheduled start time, Sentinels announced that they would be having Rawkus and Dani come in as emergency roster substitutes. The team went on to lose to OpTic 2-0, giving them an overall record of 0-3 in the group stage.
“It feels like everything that could go wrong is going wrong for them right now,” caster Smix said on the broadcast.
The match started off on OpTic’s map pick, Fracture. OpTic went with a standard composition, only moving yay onto Chamber, while Sentinels were forced to change up their roles due to the last-minute roster changes. Kanpeki shifted to duelist, throwing it back to Neon’s release when he was one of the best players on the agent in NA. Despite some clutch plays from coach Rawkus (who also currently has COVID) and Kanpeki’s expertise on Neon, Sentinels lost the map 13-5.
After OpTic’s dominance on the first map, the teams moved to Sentinels’ map pick, Bind. The map started off with a pistol round that would end with Marved taking a knife fight against dapr.
This unconventional pistol round win was one of only two rounds Sentinels secured in the first half.
Down 10-2, Sentinels came back to win six rounds on defense, forcing OpTic to use their timeout. After the pause, OpTic came back with a methodical approach to their attack, and yay sealed the round for them. Following this momentum, OpTic took the last round to win the map and the match, with a final score of 13-8.
Fortunately for Sentinels fans, the team is still not mathematically eliminated from advancing out of the group stage. If Sentinels can win its next two games against FaZe Clan and Cloud9, advancing is still possible, as long as C9 loses to FaZe on Sunday. Hopefully with their main roster back, the team has an opportunity to redeem themselves next week.
The next match for Sentinels is Jun. 4 at 3pm CT against FaZe.
