At this point, I think most Boston Uprising fans are at a loss. During the casting, the UberX duo got it 100% right. They weren’t bashing the Uprising; they were pointing out the obvious flaws that they had and the coaches should have known better. But apparently they didn’t. Whoever was making those calls, like holding onto 6 ults for over 2 minutes when they could have just ended it with a lot of time on their clock, was making major mistakes. Let’s take a closer look at the match.

The first map was Oasis, and the Uprising and the Titans went back and forth. It looked solid, until going into the last round in Map 1. The Uprising didn’t even bother trying to fight for high ground. They just sat down on the point and got slaughtered repeatedly. It wasn’t even close. It wasn’t even fun to watch. How could they look so solid the round before, then end up just falling apart? It seemed insane. As my husband and I screamed at the television, “Why not the high ground?”, we heard the casters wonder the same thing. Vancouver won Map 1.

Boston then ended up picking King’s Row for their next map. Maybe, I hoped, there was a different strategy. Maybe we’d see Colourhex on Junkrat on defense with Jerry on Widow. Maybe we’d see a Rein/Zarya comp, which is common for King’s Row. Except, they went with the same meta comp. Things did go well for them on their first attack. Then the Titan’s had a better attack. Then, the Uprising took way too slow to cap it in the next round which led them into the eternal overtime that would stop the minute people left the point. Or got slaughtered off of the point, right at the archway, ending the round. Their 2nd defense went much better and it looked like they were going to do it, especially after Jerry put in some hard work. Then Fusions died. And slowly our team died and then the point was capped, making their walk back so far away that they likely weren’t going to make it in time. But don’t worry, we have Bob right? Except Bob didn’t feel like cooperating and ran past the point. The team on the point died and the rest of the team just didn’t make it back in time. Boston is down 0-2. 1 map to keep them in the game.

Boston picked Hanamura, a map that they had done pretty decently on in the past. They ended up quickly capping the first point and had over 5 minutes to cap the second. They had a massive ult advantage that they could have used to waltz into the point. But they didn’t. Ok. Maybe they wanted to bait out the Titan’s ults first. But then…. they still didn’t go for the point. It wasn’t until about 2 minutes that they went in with their ults and eventually capped and they had no time on the clock. The only way that the Uprising could stay alive is if they managed a full hold to force a draw and get another map pick. They crumbled, and the Titans took the match 3-0 and knocked the Uprising out of the Countdown Cup qualifiers.

So what happened? The usual happened. We get excited and we start thinking “yeah, we can do this”, but then we get our hopes squashed right in front of us. A big problem is that we keep forcing Colourhex and Fusions to play the meta rather than to play to their strengths. If we wanted to play the meta, we should have picked up a DPS with a Genji and a tank with a more flexible hero pool. Not force a player that can be pretty great when he’s in a groove, but not so stellar otherwise. But I don’t blame the players for this. I blame the shot callers. I blame the people who said “Maybe we don’t need to go high ground here”, then get rolled for the rest of the round. The guy who was like “Hey we have all of these ults, let’s snowball it and cap this point with 4 minutes on the clock. Or… we just hold them for 2 minutes and do absolutely nothing with them, then barely cap the point and end up having no time to go again.” I blame the person who doesn’t hire extra players to sub in for specific roles so that we can get these wins. That’s the person(s) to blame for the loss.

At this point, the organization should just hire the fans to know what to do because they seem to better understand the game than the coaching staff and management does. Can we improve during this short break before the next round of matches? I hope so. It’s too late to fire and hire a new coaching staff, for logistical and morale reasons. But this time, they need to clean house and not of the players this time.