They won their first match, but what is the future for Team Vitality at IEM Katowice and can they take the trophy? We take a look and also talk to dupreeh about his experience in the team so far.
Team Vitality enters the 2022 season touting a French-Danish superteam, as former Astralis duo Peter “dupreeh” Rasmussen and Emil “Magisk” Reif join the roster in place of Jayson “Kyojin” Nguyen Van and Richard “shox” Papillon, tied together with coaching legend Danny “zonic” Sørensen. In their debut as a team at the BLAST Spring Groups, the team finished at the top of the tournament despite trading wins with FaZe Clan. The team also scored first blood on the new G2 Esports – the gears are turning for the Vitality machine, and they look to tread through Katowice directly to the trophy.
Just over a month after making the leap to Team Vitality, dupreeh seems to have only good things to say about his experience thus far:
dupreeh: It has been really great in so many aspects. Coming from Astralis, where I’ve been playing for most of my career, coming to a new home has been different, but a good different. I think it is really nice to see the hunger for victory and the hunger for success in Vitality. We are having a really good time together as a team and the team-building we did together in France was really good, it was a great way to get together and spend time together to see how everyone is outside of the game. I think that it is really important for everyone to get comfortable around each other so you can start building on something inside of the game. It’s been really great and I’m really happy that I decided to go here. In terms of results, we have only had one chance for making a result and we did that by qualifying to BLAST. In that sense, everything has been really good and I think we are on a really good pace in terms of developing inside the game and in terms of becoming the team we want to be. Obviously there is still a ton of work in front of us, but so far so good.
The opening round would prove a test for Team Vitality. There, MOUZ stood in wait, having reached the group stage by beating both GODSENT and Entropiq despite the absence of rifler Aurimas “Bymas” Pipiras. The two squads played 103 rounds over the course of three maps, but Vitality would ultimately come out on top thanks to another stellar performance from Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut alongside dupreeh – both of whom reached 40 eliminations in the opening map.
In the next round, Vitality will face Heroic for a spot in the upper bracket finals. They have struggled against Casper “cadiaN” Møller’s team in the past, failing to beat them once throughout 2021. However, this new roster might be just what Vitality needs to get themselves over the line and avoid the lower bracket entirely on route to the playoffs.
