Epic day of Overwatch sees London Spitfire take the Stage 1 title
London Spitfire have been crowned Stage 1 champions of the Overwatch League.
Monday 12 February 2018 17:59, UK
A gruelling final day of the Overwatch League season ended with London Spitfire emerging victorious and taking the title of Stage 1 champions.
Before the action got under way, there were several permutations as to how the play-offs could look.
London Spitfire faced off first against New York Excelsior, the top seeds in the final set of regular-season matches.
The match, as expected, was a tightly run affair but London's lack of ability to win a control point cost them as they fell 3-2 and handed New York the top spot.
The Houston Outlaws against the Boston Uprising ultimately determined who would face the Spitfire in the first play-off match. It was again a close match, going to a tie-breaker, but the Outlaws edged Boston to secure a date with a London team they had beaten 3-1 just a day prior.
Whereas a normal Overwatch League day is comprised of three matches, the play-off day had five.
The play-off stage ushered in a new format - whereby the games would follow a traditional best-of-five format. The first to three would take victory, whereas the round-robin allowed 4-0 wins.
The analyst desk sided heavily with Houston heading into the second-versus-third match-up. The Outlaws had beaten the Spitfire just the day before in fairly convincing fashion, and the American team were the preferred choice on the desk.
All predictions went out of the window, however.
The Outlaws opened up with a dominant performance on Dorado - the only map that Spitfire had won the previous day. In return, Spitfire banished their Houston demons and simply annihilated them.
Houston would not win a single map until Spitfire had taken the victory with Korean duo Ji-hyuk "birdring" Kim and Joon-yeong "Profit" Park proving too hot for the Outlaws defence to handle. A 3-1 triumph would see a rematch of the first game of the day, Excelsior versus Spitfire.
The difference in the final game was that $100,000 and the Stage 1 title were on the line. Spitfire started slowly, dropping Junkertown and Oasis to go 2-0 down and require an epic reverse sweep to come back and claim the title.
The Spitfire had played nine games of Overwatch in the same day as the final. The team showed why they are considered the best in the world on Horizon Lunar Colony as they brushed past Excelsior before shutting them out on Numbani to set up a fifth map decider.
After 11 hours and 14 games of Overwatch, Spitfire would conquer the Excelsior to gain revenge and take home the title. Birdring and Profit played to the potential expected from them and simply decimated every opponent.
Excelsior still lead the overall Overwatch rankings. The next stage gets under way on Thursday, February 22, when London will meet a now familiar foe in the Houston Outlaws.
