Alliance take down Team Liquid at ESL One Los Angeles Online

The Dota 2 rivalry between Alliance and Team Liquid has reached a new chapter. INSaNiA and his team fell to the new s4-led Alliance roster today after dropping two straight games at ESL One Los Angeles Online.
Limmp was the only player on Alliance who had anything going in game one, with his Void Spirit putting up a solid fight and still having a net positive performance despite Liquid absolutely stomping his teammates. The Liquid core of Lone Druid, Storm Spirit, and Bristleback combined for 22 kills and 30,000 damage, more than triple the total production of nearly the entire Alliance roster.
That 25-9 result flipped in game two, though. Alliance essentially shut down all of Liquid’s offensive potential within the first five minutes and let their Ember Spirit and Templar Assassin go to work. S4 had a classic performance on his Nature’s Prophet. He went untouched and Alliance slaughtered Liquid to take an 18-minute win and tie up the series.
Right from the start of the third draft, Liquid seemed to misplay and take a core of heroes that were built for a quick game and had little synergy together. This led to all of the analysts writing off any chance of them winning unless they could dominate within the first 10 minutes.
That show of force never came to fruition. Samuel “Boxi” Svahn was the only Alliance player who made a move as both sides played on even footing through 15 minutes.
Once that 15-minute mark was reached, Nikolay “Nikobaby” Nikolov’s Wraith King started leading the charge and he was able to take on pretty much anyone from Alliance along with Limmp’s Death Prophet. Those two core heroes also led to a perfect Mars game for s4. Alliance went on to crush Liquid down the stretch, not losing a single hero in the final five minutes.
This loss bumps Liquid down to the bottom of Group B. It’s going to be nearly impossible for them to make it out of the group stage if they don’t turn things around quickly. Meanwhile, Alliance push up into the top five, sitting just outside of the safe zone to make the playoffs heading into a matchup with Team Spirit on April 9.