London Spitfire: Stage One, Week One - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

On Thursday January 11th the Spitfire kicked off their campaign in the inaugural season of the Overwatch League against the Florida Mayhem. If your anything like me, you've been counting down the days since preseason for opening weekend to begin and you wouldn’t have been disappointed. Now that the games are meaningful and the first week is complete, I’m going to provide my views on how the weekend went with The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

The concept of this is pretty straight forward, I'll review the two games of each weekend and provide to you what I thought was good about the Spitfire performance, what was bad and finally what was downright ugly. I plan to do this every week, so now the games have begun, let’s take flight.

Week One - at Mayhem & Fusion. Lineup -  Bdosin, Birdring, Fury, Gesture, Profit and NUS

The Good

Week One began the merger of the GC Busan & Kongdoo Panthera rosters plus Fury and NUS for the first time with great success. The lineup played well in both games and had a good level of cohesion for their first professional games together. The Birdring & Profit DPS partnership is deadly! It ensured that Tracer was consistently in play by one of two of the best Tracer players in the world with devastating effect. Birdring his showed flexibility on Anbuis with some amazing Widowmaker plays allowing Profit to show how deadly his Genji really is. It was a promising start for a DPS corps that's being dubbed the best in the league.

Gesture also came up huge as the main tank, showing that he does have more than a Winston in his locker. His Orsia was nice to see and he had an incredible outplay on Oasis University where he hid and let the Mayhem pass, before hitting the back line with an Earthshatter to completely disrupt and unsuspecting Florida team, turning the map on its head. In the game against the Fusion, Gesture was constantly a threat to their back line and soaked up pressure when he was required to protect his team, he picked up a well deserved MVP for his performance

The Bad

There wasn’t anything that was really that bad in week one that comes to mind when reviewing the tape. The one thing you could probably say that will be a quick fix, was that the dive comp wasn’t as fluid as it could be. It seemed very hit and miss during game one against the Mayhem but there was a noticeable improvement in game two verses the Fusion. With only a month to bond it’s something that will come along nicely, as when it worked it was overpowering.

The Ugly

There was only one ugly moment in week one and it came versus the Mayhem. I'm going to put it down first map nerves  but on the attack side of Dorado, the Spitfire were in a fairly good position in overtime at point 2, but they then all communication seems to have gone out the window and they all came off the payload and didn't return before the time ran out. This also is something that happened during the preseason, so is likely something that does need working on. 

This was a good first week for the boys who have set the tone nicely going into week two against much harder competition in the 2-0 Los Angeles Valiant & surprise 0-2 team Dallas Fuel.