Team Spirit will not defend the Aegis at The International 2024

headline photo credits: Valve

The International 2024 will not witness a three-peat from Team Spirit as they got knocked out in 9th-12th place.

The last day before The International 2024 Main Event in the Royal Arena closed with a series many would have hoped would be this year’s TI grand finals. Xtreme Gaming and Team Spirit went head to head with elimination on the line in the second round of the lower bracket.

• Read also: Xtreme Gaming team profile: Bask in the Presence of the Dark Lord

Xtreme GamingvsTeam Spirit

The battle of the giants started with a very even first game. Illya "Yatoro/Raddan" Mulyarchuk got to play Luna, while Wang "Ame" Chunyu asked his coach for a Muerta. The double TI champion carry got to score the first blood only two minutes into the game, but two minutes later XG already had the lead in kill score with 3-1 and a small gold advantage too. Nonetheless, Spirit kept the aggression high with an offlane Nightstalker.

Team Spirit got the rotations going early, mainly with Denis "Larl" Sigitov making perfect use of his Dragon Knight to force Ame out of the lane and take early objectives. Around the 33 minute mark, both teams were looking at securing the second Roshan kill of the game. With XG on the Radiant side and Team Spirit on Dire, it was the Chinese team that got the better initiation, taking down Luna and Nightstalker and the Aegis too to establish an 8k gold lead.

Although that was the most important team fight of the game, Team Spirit didn’t let their guard down and were able to punish Xtreme ten minutes later when they were pushing the high ground for the second time. At that point, Xtreme were left without buybacks, which allowed Spirit to make a counterattack on the heels of a successful base defence and start the best-of-three with a win.

However, Xtreme returned even more motivated for game two and got to reverse sweep the two-time TI champions with back-to-back stomps. They got to get their hands on Tusk in the first phase of the draft in game two, and secured Luna, Visage and Sniper in core position to make the most use of the Drinking Buddies facet and even the series in 25 minutes.

It all went from bad to worse for Team Spirit, who chose to go with a last pick vintage Yatoro Terrorblade for the last game of the night but found themselves outpaced and outplayed once more.

With Team Spirit eliminated, The International 2024 will see a new champion this year. China moves into the Main Event with just Xtreme Gaming left to fight for the most wanted Dota 2 trophy, while Eastern Europe has just BetBoom Team, who are also fighting through the lower bracket rounds.

The International 2024 heads into a two-day break. The top eight teams will kick things off on September 13 on the Royal Arena stage from Copenhagen, Denmark.

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