OK, hands up I admit it; I underestimated you Americans. Not so much in the areas where it is impossible to deny your superiority such as Dead or Alive and Project Gotham, but I had always sneered at the idea that the US players were going to dominate the proceedings in Counter-Strike. This, for my mind, was the sole preserve of the Europeans, an area where the US teams seemed stubbornly refuse to adopt the playing style of the best CSS teams in the world and to their detriment.

I’d watched the US teams play and had seen nothing there that impressed me to the point where I was going to rethink this view before the world final. I’d watched every minute of the CGS season and it reinforced my view that the teams were too over reliant on their ability to outshoot a team and to rely on the designated AWP users in the side to make those first all important picks on maps. There seemed to be little teamwork, little tactical innovation and a lack of interest in tactical flashing and smoking. When the shooting failed there was no plan B as such and it sometimes spectacularly failed. So yeah, I was confident that the US teams would be up against it when the UK and Europeans came into their backyard.

I‘d written an article that I’m so grateful at the time was not published as there would be even more egg on my face right now than there already is through this admission. One paragraph read:

“What can you expect from a generation of players that have been brought up with the Hollywood notion of the one bullet proof, everyman, killing machine? John McLain, John Rambo, John Matrix and probably lots of others called John have permeated the conscious in a way that hasn’t happened to their European brethren. This is why they consider it almost an unnecessary insult to have to flash an opponent first and then shoot them down blind. ‘Where is the challenge in that?’ they cry as they Yippee-Ki-Yay their way through a match. Who needs smoke to obscure their vision if they can simply shoot out their eyes from a distance? This is how the American player likes to roll and while it is great to watch it will do them no good when they have to face the likes of Berlin and Stockholm who will use teamwork in a way they’ve not had to play against before. Coordinated flashes will keep players blind for tens of seconds at a time before a wave of aggressors come tearing round a corner and fill everything they can see full of holes. There is no machismo in the way a Euro plays, they don’t want to trade in a series of 1v1s, and they don’t want to make those impossible once in a blue moon shots. They just want to win and have no qualms about shooting you if you’re blind, or even if your back is turned. There was no Wild West in Europe and it will show in the way the teams will perform like well oiled machines when they show the US how it is done.”

Now while some of that was tongue in cheek for sure, I genuinely believed that the European teams would have CSS at least in lockdown and the matches would be decided by other games. Yet this proved to be not the case as the inevitable all US final came about. The only side that beat a US CSS team was Birmingham Salvo against Chicago Chimera, the rest of the UK and Euro sides crumbling under the pressure. Even I’d have to say that the reason for this victory was due to the style of play from Salvo being more in keeping with what we were used to from US sides; their players simply came up huge with some breathtaking shooting. Of course, in the long run it didn’t stop a US team taking it home, but it was one of the very few high points of the event looking at it from this side of the water.

At one point I really started to believe that my characterization of the US players was bang on as I watched the rush happy brutalization of Singapore at the hands of Carolina. It was crude, savage CSS the likes of which did not impress. The players did things that seemed incredibly stupid and Sam “devour” Chamma, the talisman of the side, looked decidedly ordinary as he tried to hold banana with his AWP.

Mark Dolven and I often exchange our views of the games at bizarre times of the day via MSN and I was a little bit chiding when I gave my views of the CSS match. He was displaying his usual self confidence when we caught up moments after his victory in that game and he was telling me how he could not wait to “destroy” London Mint in their upcoming game. I pointed out if the CSS team even played twice as well as they did when I watched them they would lose heavily, an assertion to which he just laughed. “You think we were playing properly?” he asked me, a clear rhetorical question. He went on to hammer home the point “What would be the point in employing our tactics against opponents we can just simply outshoot? Why give London Mint the opportunity to counter our strategies? I think you’ll find my boys were told to freestyle it...” and while I was a little skeptical that this was entirely the case it did make sense to me.