Team Australia emerges into the Qudos Bank Arena. Thousands stand on their feet as the Australian national anthem begins to play. A man dressed as Steve Irwin and holding an inflatable kangaroo proudly recites the words; at his side is someone wearing a red-and-blue suit made up of Australian flags.
It's the IEM Sydney 2019 "Caches III" show match, and although it's not how they wanted to be introduced to the crowd, both Sean "Gratisfaction" Kaiwai and Jay "Liazz" Tregillgas smile during the intro.
A lot has happened since they were here last year. At the end of 2018, both players joined the U.S.-based Renegades, a team historically made up of Australians, but based internationally among higher levels of competition. Upon joining, the two quickly exceeded expectations and helped elevate Renegades to unprecedented levels of play. They became part of the first ANZ core to make a playoffs at a major, earned a top-four placement at a stacked StarSeries S7, and were considered in April, albeit briefly, the fifth-best team in the world.
It's for this reason that the walk-out is, unfortunately, bittersweet. Renegades were knocked out in the group stage of Sydney, failing to make it to the arena and marking their first downward dip in results this year. But as they walk back onto home soil, it's also a moment of reflection for how far they've come as players, and more importantly, how the Australian scene has developed to help them transition onto Renegades in the first place.
Moving small fishes to a big pond
The Australian CS scene is a tricky heap to transcend. There are, broadly speaking, four top teams. They hold a majority of the best players in the scene and they are all practicing and playing full-time. Other teams struggle to match them in terms of talent, commitment and LAN experience. This creates a number of interesting dynamics in how the top four (or "div one") teams practice and aim to elevate their game.
"The problem with the domestic scene is that [div one teams] play each other so much now because of all these qualifying spots that our games are so messed up," Fergus "ferg" Stephenson, coach of div one team Chiefs, said. "It must look like the worst CS. We're just trying to counter-counter-counter... It can be a complete mess."
This often leads to the top four teams rarely practicing against each other so as to not reveal strategies for inevitable important qualifying matches. "We will play div two teams way more than div one teams [in scrims] because we don't want to show them that much," Erdenetsogt "erkaSt" Gantulga of Grayhound Gaming said.
It creates an environment in which top Australian players aren't consistently put under strong, mistake-punishing pressure. In many ways, this makes it very hard for teams as a whole in div one to make significant strides with their tactics, protocols and mindset. In another sense, though, it creates a certain culture of dominance for these top Australian pros. "Building confidence, beating on worse teams, can be really good for a player," Liazz said. "For someone like Gratisfaction, that's instrumental to his success in Renegades. The second he came over here, he's playing all his old roles and everything, he's doing all the same stuff, but with confidence and it's working against top players internationally."
Gratisfaction's AWP proved to be, alongside Liazz's more supportive play, integral in elevating Renegades over a number of European sides. Both players say they've improved significantly while abroad and have grown alongside Renegades as a whole. The key to their integration into the side, though, wasn't as much centered on mechanical dominance as it was easily fitting into the team culture. "For them to be able to instantly transition into that Renegades lineup and then start doing really big numbers shows they have been brought up in really good cultures in the teams within Australia," ferg said.
Gratisfaction's former team, Grayhound Gaming, boasts the most infamous of those team cultures. The side was the first in Australia to move into a gaming house and stuck together as a five-man core far longer than most other div one teams. "Everyone got along so well in Grayhound that it made it easy," Gratisfaction said of transitioning between teams. "When I got the offer from Renegades I was kind of worried there wouldn't be the camaraderie I had in Aus. But it's obviously here so I've been pleasantly surprised."
More followers, but more of the same
Although the practice dynamic and team cultures can create the foundation for a high-level domestic player to transfer confidence internationally, they can also encourage an overall stagnant level of play from top teams. Without a side like Renegades consistently poaching the top talent, the scene can become "more cesspit than breeding ground" ferg said. Seemingly, there needs to be a cycle in Australian Counter-Strike for it to move forward -- one in which top players occasionally leave div one play for international endeavours, and div two players join div one teams, to keep fresh blood constantly circulating.
Without a Renegades-type team taking top Australian pros, div one sides are incentivised to avoid the risk of developing div two talent. For example, without the departures of Gratisfaction and Liazz, young players Euan "sterling" Moore and Charlie "zeph" Dodd would likely never have been brought up to div one teams like ORDER and Grayhound. Unfortunately, Renegades have no immediate need for another roster move. And for erkaSt, this means that the current "level of play is going to be here for a while."
In this sense, just like Liazz and Gratisfaction's walk-out to the Qudos Bank Arena, their addition to Renegades is bittersweet. On one hand, they represent the best of a developing competitive ecosystem. Their dominance internationally is validation for the scene, proof that the current environment in Australia is capable of producing legitimate international LAN beaters. On the other hand, though, their move is representative of the limited pathways Australian pros have to transcend their region despite having the talent to dominate abroad. Their move signals the start of what might be another long period of stagnation for the scene's overall level; the same level that produced great players, and the same one that will encourage a frustrating status quo.