A wonderful ending to a wonderful year, and Christmas coming up. What else can a man ask for? Nah, on a more serious note, it feels good that we finally made it big. We played a lot better at CPL than at WSVG. We lived together for 5 weeks, but only got quality practice worth of two weeks or something like that. We really wanted to play a lot, but there were not many teams for us to practice against, which was really frustrating. Everybody thought we came in like the best prepared team attending WSVG, which added a lot of pressure on us, I think. We played sort of nervous and sloppy and I really feel that we should have at least won train versus 3D. Even though we ended up third I think everybody felt a bit disappointed, due to the fact that we had the consolation final match and pretty much started playing stupid/nervous and gave that game away.

At CPL I think we played our best CS this far in Fnatic. We came into the the tournament more relaxed and just played like it did not matter that much to us. To us that meant that we did not let a bad start or unlucky rounds upset us and we did not play nervous at all. Eventually, as you all probably know, we ended up winning the final and tournament in two straight maps (16-7 on train and 16-4 on mill vs MYM).

After the final Archi and I went for some shopping, and if we would have not had an early plane the morning after we would have gone out. I mean, it´s rare for us to do not go out when we feel we have just a little reason to do so. Now we had two big reasons: We won CPL and it was Archi´s birthday. I guess we all know how it feels to be on a plane hung-over. So we did just chill at home, ordered in some food delivery to our hotel rooms and watched some TV.

The trip home was painful – we flew Dallas to New York, New York to Amsterdam, then from there to Gothenburg. Luckily Archi and I live in Gothenburg. After traveling for about 24 hours, Tentpole and Forest was looking into 8 hours more in a car home to Stockholm. Yikes.

I will probably write another blog analyzing our play in one of our matches from CPL, but I do not know which one yet.

Last in this blog I would just like to thank Fnatic for our X-mas gifts (we all got Nintendo DS´s in New York, and had loads of fun with them playing sick multiplayer sessions of Bomberman and Mario Kart) and everything that everybody in Fnatic have done for us this year, our sponsors Intel, Nvidia, Razer (thanks Matthew for the Singapore experience) and Everglide for supporting Fnatic, and last but not least our fans for believing in us and supporting us. We would not be anything without you.

Happy X-mas and a Happy New Year if this is the last I write before 2007,

Harley, dsn.



Fnatic in Singapore, September 2006.