smooya will forever be one of CSGO’s greatest ‘what ifs’

Ah man. It would be so sad if it wasn’t so predictable.

fnatic have kicked smooya, if you missed it, and people really pretended they were surprised. People really thought this one was for real, and the Movistar Riders, BIG and Chaos periods were all just unlucky. 

Leopards do change their spots, but usually it takes longer than… a year or so. 

Did UKCS infect smooya, or the other way around?

To understand where things went wrong for smooya, it’s important to understand the circumstances that preceded his rise.

While UKCS is famous for it’s self-destructive tendencies, overdramatic nature and terrible quality of play… wait, I thought there was going to be something redeeming about it to counter-balance that sentence. Never mind. 

But this is important; not only was smooya a part of a scene that almost breeds a level of arrogance and hara-kiri, but there were no good all UK teams for him to join. Hell, fnatic is comfortably the best UK team he could have joined, and it has two Swedes on it.

It’s rare a player is able to grow when the only teams they can join are international ones, and those that do require immense credit.

That factor is only amplified with smooya, a guy whose quick wit and charm are so distinguishably English that it often translates poorly to people from other cultures. Yeah, he’s abrasive, but he’s less abrasive to other Englishmen.

Just look at KRiMZ and Brollan’s reaction to him here.

…in fairness, even the English guys seem a little bit weirded out.

smooya has undeniable talent, but he’s also inconsistent. His performance at Katowice was lacklustre, and often looked more at home with the rifle than the big green. While he consistently looks like he can make the step-up to tier one by obliterating tier 2 teams, he quite often looks out of his depth at the top tier.

He’s the West Brom of Counter-Strike. That might be too harsh.

A lot of that could have been ironed out if he’d been able to sit at this level for a while under a good IGL, and had been able to learn and grow; but like, he didn’t seem all that keen on learning from Gob b. 

And that’s the thing; be it through his own hard-headedness or the way UKCS ‘nurtured’ his talent, smooya never learned, he never grew up and he never reached his potential. Maybe he could have been a great player. Maybe he could have been the saviour of UKCS.

But instead, he will forever be destined to the purgatory of too good for tier 2, not good enough for tier 1, remaining as one of the biggest What If stories in CSGO.