Fnatic’s situation hasn’t improved despite the start of a new split; they went 0-3 in the first week of LEC Spring 2023. Even though we’ve just been going for a week, their chances of making playoffs are deteriorating. What kind of problems are holding Fnatic back? Is it really possible for the team to finish last this season? Let’s take a closer look.
Oscarinin and Advienne, who replaced Wunder and Rhucks respectively, joined Fnatic prior to LEC Spring. Although the latter can be viewed as an improvement over Rhuckz given Advienne’s prior LEC experiences, adding a young ERL player to a squad like Fnatic, to put it mildly, is suicidal. And it began to manifest itself fully in week 1.
The Spanish top laner has blatantly demonstrated its limitations when playing against other top laners in the LEC, getting punished and solo murdered mercilessly in each of the three games that were played. Sadly for him, it didn’t help that he was up against three of the greatest players in the league: Photon, Irrelevant, and Odoamne, who, well, is still Odoamne, are all coming off successful Winter Splits.
Teams have probably also observed that it is now much simpler to punish Wunder’s top lane, as it was with Fnatic. The fundamental issue that needs to be resolved is that, despite Oscarinin taking all the pressure, Fnatic is unable to gain an advantage elsewhere on the map. Having said that, it appears that the players are being severely handicapped by the team’s drafting, preventing them from competing.
Fnatic has struggled greatly with sub-optimal drafting since the end of the last split, and despite the meta shift, the issue still appears to exist. Although it can be beneficial to select a double-ranged bot lane to have high lane priority and let Razork take the initiative in that part of the map, Fnatic has been severely penalized for this choice of tactic.
With only one victory in his first five games in the split, Heimerdinger has been more of a bait selection. Ashe, on the other hand, has received 13 bans, demonstrating how highly teams value the selection. Fnatic was the only team capable of playing it, but they were unable to make it function.
Fnatic will need to figure out a solution because most teams will opt for engage supports. They may be able to play through their bot lane proactive or have their bot lane play for the jungle and mid lane. As of right now, it appears that not much has changed because Humanoid and Razork still appear to be extremely eager to make plays and develop leads for themselves.
We have noticed some slight improvements despite all the problems. They appear to be a little bit better synchronized when setting up dives, as we have seen, for instance, in the series versus SK Gaming. Oscarinin will also be able to obtain extra scrim time and practice for the forthcoming matchups, which will help him improve over the course of the split.
Given this, Fnatic’s main challenge is figuring out how to make things happen on the map’s bottom side while ensuring that Rekkles and Humanoid have access to the resources they need to carry. Given the limited time Fnatic has and the pressure of knowing that losing further games will remove them from the group’s contention, it will be difficult.
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