Okay, I know a lot more went on in the combine and draft than most of us know or saw, including the people at the event, so I'm not going to claim to know everything that went down, but here's my opinions on it.

Overall the draft was pretty much as anyone expected. I made a mini prediction before the draft, and it was pretty accurate, with 2 mistakes. However, one of these mistakes has caused huge controversy and incited mass dismay across the community - fnatic not being picked. Accusations have been thrown back and forth, "bsl is biased!", "cgs is unfair!", "NoA suck!" etc, and I wanted to explain why I think these accusations are ridiculous.

Let's talk about the first one, Bsl being biased. Now, for those people who don't know Bsl, do a little research about him before hand. This guy has contributed SO much to eSports over the years. He's an amazing journalist, an amazing counterstrike player, and he does a lot of stuff behind the scenes which he doesn't get the credit for. People are saying he is biased for picking NoA instead of fnatic, because he used to be assosciated with the organisation. If you think about it logically though, why the hell would that matter? If you worked for an organisation 4 years ago (that's longer than CSS has been about), do you really think you'd have ANY alliances with any of them? I know for a fact Bsl was approached about being a GM, rather than applying himself, and I'm sure up till that point he had never heard of any of the players, let alone spoken to them or have any bias towards them. He was also criticised for picking Manya for the same reason, which I think is absolutely absurd. It's insulting to a man of that calibre to think he would be influenced by such a trivial relationship.

Yes, I think fnatic deserved the draft more, but going into the combine, fnatic and NoA we're the favourites. EYEballers impressed so much, they definitely deserved it, which leaves fnatic and NoA fighting for the last spot. Now, I'm not saying NoA performed better, because I know on paper they didn't, but fnatic definitely underperformed at the combine. As I said, I know fnatic still did better, but they definitely weren't the same team we've seen across Europe this year. This put Bsl in a really shitty position, where he has to decide whether fnatic are a lot weaker generally with ylSs than proph, or whether they just had a bad tournament. He also has to decide which team can help grow his franchise better, and bring in the fans and sponsorship (which I think is the way the teams are going to head eventually, though I may be wrong) which will help determine the success of the team outside of the game. Anyone who watched the draft will know how hard a decision it was for Bsl, and how badly he felt for fnatic after making it. He went and spoke to them afterwards, and although I don't know what was said, maybe one of the fnatic guys could fill us in.

At the end of the day, it was a really difficult decision, and although you may think he made a mistake, I think it's incredibly disrespectful and unnecesary to question his legitimacy as a manager.

People we're also saying that CGS is unfair for allowing decisions like this, and to counter this point I'd like to quote something Redeye posted on another thread :

"Why do people keep slating the CGS as a league for GM's picks? This just proves that a lot of you dont get it sadly. If the CGS really was a pretend, fake league as many keep saying, then why would they have told the GM's to leave out the most marketable and technically the best CS:S team in the entire european region? You cant have it both ways. The GM's pick who THEY think will do the best job and its not just about the results at a combine either. The CGS as a league plays NO PART in the picks and as such, the comments regarding CGS beign bad because of a personal selection by a GM are just flawed."

I think that pretty much sums it up, so I won't go into more detail about it.

At the end of the day, I think the one thing this showed us was that there weren't enough teams for Europe. When Region 1 had 6 teams and teams like Pandemic (now Caroline Core) got drafted, and clearly weren't up to the standard required at the time, and Europe has to turn down teams like fnatic, I think something went wrong in the logistics. I don't think the UK needs less teams, as both Dignitas and Zboard have shown they are good enough to compete with the best, and I truley think either of them would do us proud at the world championships (and I hate to say it, but I think Dignitas will do it better now). If Region 1 was reduced to 5 teams and Region 3 was upped to 5, I think the draft would have been a lot more fair in both regions.

However, in the second season more teams are likely to get added, so fnatic should work their asses off for another year, and prove to everyone why they should have been drafted. Oh, and bring CPL success to Europe :D