Germany vs UK

Or the story of what could have been a very nice match...

As we speak now, both Germany and UK are very similar in term of past and present Q2 history. We can consider them as "lost glories". They used to rule the European scene and now most of their top legendary players have left the building. What remains is a bunch of old and skilled players for who the main problem is to play together and get some kind of a teamplay going.
Seasons after seasons though, they come closer and closer to getting a good team alchemestry.

We quickly agreed on a server on which -it has to be said- Germany has a slight ping disadvantage. The game was played on a dutch server called "AFH".

Q2DM2 - Tokay's Tower Germany's map

It all started with Germany grabbing an early lead, they took control of the RA Lift: an impressive play by Fruz there who seemed very confident and managed to keep the lift alone with a rail only. Until Fichte (aka Picea) came to help him with rockets. UK struggled hard the first few minutes... Afterward they finally managed to get some quads. Nite and Samedi did most of the (successfull) quadruns for UK. The score became closer.

Although all the germans had railguns, they kept playing a bit too defensive and they let too much space to UK to get good quadruns going. Fichte and dIem were both sneaky railing everywhere while JuN was giving a hard time to UK's quadrunners at the RL lift.

Near the end, I started to wonder what was happening to Impossible who had a very bad score so I chased him a bit. I could notice that he didn't really know what to do until he found out he was going to do something he's obviously very good at: Chaining! He started to chainrape all the German players below the RA lift and because of the score became even more closer.
Nevertheless, he got killed and Germany increased their score until the end and won.

Q2DM1 - The (One and only original) Edge UK's map

Now for dm1, it was UK's turn to get a very good start. Sp_ and Doomeh got many rail kills at the beginning respectively at Rail and Mega.
UK players quickly got tooled up with railguns and locked the map for about 10 minutes. Only Fichte could manage to get a railgun once in a while and did his maximum to conserve it as long as possible.

Impossible played at a position that I thought nobody used anymore: the Arena! He was denying the RL-Armor-SSG to the Germans with, once again, devastative chainings.

When 5 minutes were left, Germany started to take over the main positions of dm1 one after one. Rail, then MH, then Lift. As you know, when this little puzzle is completed on dm1 you can easily start to rape the other team with railguns. What they did! We could spectate a great comeback there but UK still won eventually.

The third map:

UK had the frag advantage, we were about to start the elimination process until I got informed by dIem that Fichte couldn't play anymore (apparently because of a pain he regularly gets in the shoulder after playing).
I allowed dIem to quickly recruit a member for his team (as I knew there were few other active german players around) but he declined. Then I told UK the options they had:
- Winning the third map by forfeit
- Rescheduling it

Zilla started an internal vote with his team and they picked the first option.

Conclusion:

It's really too bad for the third map because those teams were pretty equals and it could have been a thriller. The first 2 games were exciting despite being kinda defensive.