When the cats are away, the mice will play, or so the saying goes, and the mice of mousesports have been on their own for a long, long time now. From the outside it’s very hard to know the infrastructure around any top team, but by hook or by crook Mouz went from a top-three team in the world a year or so ago to where they are today, rebuilding after a collapse that saw them bomb out of the Minor.
There is an entirely separate point about the power of coaches that can be made, and when you look at German teams in particular there does seem to be a propensity to let the lunatics run the asylum, both at Mouz and formerly SK. Now we have a new mousesports according to sources, and the team has a leader in place with a recent record of losing control of his team, and has hopefully learned from that experience.
Synergy over talent
In FaZe, karrigan had to deal with a phenomenally talented group of players that were frankly not suited to being led, and on first glance it appears he’s gone from the frying pan to the fire for no good reason, but there are some subtleties. First up is the decision to bring back ChrisJ, an experienced player with the ability to perform in a number of roles, as well as the people he has apparently not wanted around.
Whether suNny was the one to jump, or he was pushed to C9, is hard to be sure of, but it doesn’t appear to bother karrigan that much. Likewise the replacement of pundit-favourite Oskar with w0xic might seem odd if you don’t have to work with them, but when you consider Oskar is notoriously tough to please, and suNny was rumoured to be a malcontent for much of last year, it seems like karrigan has learned a lesson about the relative values of peak performance and player personality.
When you combine the potential issues suNny and Oskar bring with their drop in performance levels over recent months, this actually has the look of an intelligent rebuild, especially with young talent Frozen thrown into the mix, but time will tell. What we do think is a good sign is that evolution though, from mini-FaZe (who would want to be that in 2019?) to mousesports, a team of their own, with an identity and synergy they’ve lacked for some time.
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Image: Mouz
