Natural 9 claims The Clash

posted by ReiNNNN, 148 days ago

The underdog from down under,

Natural 9 has won BenQ The Clash after an epic Grand Final third game against

Moscow 5. Players from Natural 9 will be walking away 500€ richer and possibly be looking at a potential sponsorship due to their great performance over the course of this tournament.

Natural 9 went undefeated in the groupstages and was a big favourite coming into the playoffs, where the Aussies went on to defeat mTw in the semi-finals 2-0 to reach the Grand Final.

The first two games of the Grand Final was one-sided to say the least with the first game going to Natural 9 due to an overfarmed Anti-Mage and game two going to M5 with great play by

Sergey Alexandrovich 'GoD' Bragin (Night Stalker) and M5 stand-in,

Danil 'Dendi' Ishutin (Sand King).

A 75 minutes game broke out in the third game of the Grand Final. Natural 9 had the early lead in the game with some early ganks and tower push from

David 'r1sk' Arnous as a Furion. This lead build up a gold difference of almost 10,000 when Natural 9 got a little careless and overextended into the Dire area. Slowly, Natural 9 heroes got picked off one after another causing M5 to dive straight back into the game, levelling the gold difference after a major team battle 45 minutes into the game.

Natural 9 was in the brink of losing the game as M5 took down Roshan not once, not twice, but three times throughout the course of the game. Through some smart play and money saving for multiple buybacks, Natural 9 finally managed to take down the mid-lane and top-lane barracks halting M5 on their gold increases. They then waited for the gold difference to level and the sneaky play managed to take down all the barracks while M5 go for throne rush. Truly a remarkable ending to a great tournament.

Here is what

Justin 'xMusiCa' Yuen has to say about their win:

Justin 'xMusiCa' Yuen: We're really excited about our first win as a team in the international scenes. Hopefully there'll be many to come but we'll definitely train harder and work towards the main event, which is The International (smiles).

For our third game against M5, we had the upper had in the early game portion, but M5 came back during the mid game with really good coordination and movement, which put us back on even grounds, possibly on the back foot. We both played really well and anyone could have came out on top, but we made some really smart catching decisions and saving some gold for buybacks to take some raxes , which eventually won us the game.

Sponsors are definitely a crucial part in our progress though, and hopefully sponsors will notice us and help us achieve that goal.

JoinDOTA wishes a big congratulations to N9 and their future endeavour. Here is the VoD of game three, Natural 9 vs. M5 for your enjoyment. Do not forget to head on to our VoD section here to check out the rest of the games from BenQ The Clash. Forgive the massive spacing below.