Overwatch League Grand Final Day One Recap

By: Bryce L. Jackson

#5 London Spitfire. #6 Philadelphia Fusion. For Glory.

via GameSpot

The opening set on Dorado saw an intense duel with both needing to burn into Overtime. On the Fusion's offensive run, they managed to gain the upperhand with stellar plays from Hotba, Neptuno and Carpe to get all 3 points. London looked dominant through their first 2 points and were coming in to Checkpoint C with almost 6 minutes on the clock. But a stellar defensive hold on the final turn kept the Spitfire from pushing any more and the Fusion gained the early advantage.

The 2nd map in the best-of-5 set was Oasis, a map that the London Spitfire have been mocked at being bad at all regular season. Then they showed us that the regular season and the postseason are two different things. The Spitfire were aggressive yet methodical in capturing the point first. Even when they fell behind, the Spitfire scrapped back from a man disadvantage to overcome on University and Gardens for the quick 2-0 win to tie the series.

After halftime, Eichenwalde was next on the docket where both teams did their best impression of a defensive battle. The Fusion were able to unlock the payload thanks to plays from the usual suspects, but were only able to get to the bridge on the streets phase. During the Spitfire attack run, they were constantly sent away and looked like a full hold was in the works until the Spitfire DPS were able to find Neptuno who was the only Support player for the Fusion with Poko in for Boombox to play a triple tank strategy and finally able to break them down. From there it was smooth sailing as the Spitfire were able to stay one step ahead of changes made (and not made) by the Fusion to secure the map win.

On to Volskya Industries where the Fusion started out with the "Goats" comp (Triple Tank, Triple Support) to catch the Spitfire off guard and roll through Point A but London managed to turn them back a few times until the Fusion were finally able to break the bunker London set up. The aggression that the Fusion used to capture the first point, they used to try to quickly capture Point B and it almost worked but ended their run only capturing 57.1% of the point. The Spitfire used the same tactic that worked on Eichenwalde (Kill Neptuno, get point) to break the Point A stalemate on their attack run. On Point B, there were a few impressive holds that the Fusion used to turn away the Spitfire. Then the amazing happened. Profit lost some team members and still managed on Tracer to kill Neptuno's Mercy, use Recall and killed Carpe's Tracer who was behind him before he went to kill Mercy. He then finished off the weakened tanks, first Hotba's Roadhog with a Pulse Bomb, then Sado's Orisa and finally Poko's Pilot D.Va who threw in his ult to try and regain the advantage and was trying to re-mech. This 1v5 masterclass play ended the map and the match 3-1 in the Spitfire's favor.

Overall, this was a fantastic day of Overwatch. The matches were high quality and the energy given through the cast from the massive crowd of over 11,000 at the sold out Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY were absolutely phenomenal. Twitch viewership peaked at around 260K and with additional ratings to come soon after the end of both days of play from the Disney family of networks, the Overwatch League Grand Finals at this capacity can already be deemed a success. 

Match 2 will start at 4 PM EST on Saturday and if we need the 3rd match, that will start at 6 PM EST.