Relegated to Western Europe Division II after the Winter Tour regional league season, Alliance entered now in restructuring mode and first to depart are the team captain and the coach.
Simon "Handsken" Rasmus Haag’s second stint with Alliance comes to an end after more than two years in which he played in both support positions. In the post TI10 shuffle, when Alliance made rather drastic roster changes, he and Nikolay "Nikobaby" Nikolov were the only two players to continue under the Swedish organization banner and together they took the task to build and lead the new Alliance line-up.
Nikobabby kept his in-game role, but for Handsken, this also meant a role change. He moved from position four to position 5 and took the captain duties as well. Under his leadership, Alliance have also officially welcomed a coach aboard and worked for the whole season with the finish player Niklas "okcya" Koskinen.
However, mid-season, the results were far from optimal. At the beginning of the new year, when they were already sitting on three losses and just one win in the DPC league, Handsken was benched and their former captain, from the TI10 roster, Artsiom "Fng" Barshak stood in for the series against OG. He joined just for one match, while the last battle of the season was held with Brame’s position four player Nikolay "CTOMAHEH1" Kalchev helping out Alliance.
In a statement released this Friday, January 21, 2022, Jonathan "Loda" Berg gave a couple of details on what went wrong for the team:
I do genuinely believe that everyone went into this project with the right hunger and will to this, but somewhere on the lane things started to break down. There was a breakdown of trust within the team itself and the org was requested to step in. We worked hard to remedy the situation but early this year it became clear that some players within the team were not willing to move forward together
- Jonathan "Loda" Berg
In the same statement, Loda specifies that now that the season is over, Alliance is going to rebuild the team, but no decisions are made yet on who stays and who goes besides Handsken. “One thing we know is that we need to have a group that is motivated, not demotivated by going to Division 2,“ Loda added.
Alliance have about six weeks to find the right formula to fight through the Western Europe Division 2 in the Spring Tour and bring the team back to the first division. Although there is no official date for the Spring Tour starting point, it is expected that the new season will begin sometime in mid March.
Alliance current line-up:
Nikolay “Nikobaby” Nikolov
Ondřej “Supream^” Štarha
Rodrigo “Leslão(old)” Lelis
Adam “Aramis” Moroz
headline picture courtesy of StarLadder
