The start of the Esports Minor League hit a slight snag as Abusement Park’s Joey “Juziro” Bartholomay was unable to show up to his team’s match on time, and again when he cut out of the series early.
Upon further review from ESML Commissioner Dylen “PROVERB” Roberts, Juziro will be suspended from play until the middle of week four, when the mid-season transfer period opens. He will be missing six games in total during this suspension.
Roberts officially enacted the suspension, and detailed it to GAMURS exclusively.
“Juziro has been suspended due to leaving the match early and will be eligible to return on Dec. 20,” Roberts said. “We promote the utmost professionalism between teams.”
Roberts also stated that further action will be taken on Abusement Park if they decide not to comply with the league rules.
“Should they break any other rules or not show up to matches on time or with a full roster in time, they will be removed from the league and their spot will be relinquished to the runner up team,” Roberts said. “We want to create a fair environment where all teams are treated with respect and seriousness.”
Abusement Park already forfeited their bonus pot, given to teams if they win a match in the league, when they arrived late to their series Monday night.
Juziro and his team had the mindset of not even playing in tonight’s series against Scion Esports, and on Sunday, he decided to join a free-for-all tournament to make up for his plan to not play on Monday.
“I was in the teambeyond ffa tourney because I thought we weren’t playing today,” Juziro wrote over online correspondence. “Yesterday, me, Josh and Joey were set on not doing it but Daffs wanted to do it today and they all got on last minute. Josh (Exemplify) was drunk, Joey’s (Sickstory) setup is weak, so it was super unorganized on our side. We all didn’t do it intentionally, [it] just happened this way.”
From Juziro’s teammate’s perspective, Joseph “SickStory” Ebbs recalled tonight’s events as a string of unfortunate events for his team, especially so for the league’s organizer.
“Nobody felt like telling Dylen that we needed to forefit our matches, because we knew how invested he was into this league,” SickStory said. “So we thought we would have to tough it out, but by that time, Jurizo was already in the FFA tournament and Exemplify was already out for drinks.”
With these issues in mind, SickStory expressed his disappointment for the way tonight’s events panned out for his team.
“It was 100 percent unfortunate what happened tonight,” SickStory said. “We didn’t want it to happen.”
Juziro will be replaced by Swish on Abusement Park until Dec. 19, and the team will be allowed one sub per week starting in week two (Dec. 5), as stated in the official ESML rules. Swish played out the rest of Abusement Park’s first ESML match after Jurizo left before the third game, where the team wound up losing to Scion Esports, 3-1.
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James Mattone is a journalist for GAMURS and can be contacted on Twitter –@TheJamesMattone.
