On February 4, Natus Vincere lost in a match with NIP at the group stage of BLAST Premier Spring Groups 2022. Now the team from the CIS can only hope to win the Last Chance stage, because if it fails in that stage, it will be eliminated from the BLAST Premier Spring Showdown.
At the beginning of the tournament, NAVI were clearly not in the best shape: before the meeting with NIP, they suffered two defeats in Group B. It seemed that the subsequent victory over Liquid improved their position somewhat, but then NIP turned out to be stronger.
Natus Vincere started the match with the Nuke map, which is usually a reliable and proven option for this team, but this time it was not as easy to succeed on it as the CIS players might have expected. The first half ended with a score of 8 – 7 in favor of NIP, and only after switching sides Natus Vincere was able to regain the advantage and win the map with a score of 16 – 11, largely thanks to the efforts of Alexander “s1mple” Kostyleva.
On Overpass, NIP almost immediately took the lead thanks to the coordinated actions of Hampus “hampus” Poser and Nicholas "Plopski" Gosaleza Zamora. Although after switching sides Natus Vincere were close to equalizing the score several times, in the end NIP remained the leaders with a score of 16 – 11. Finally, on Mirage the advantage of the Swedish team turned out to be even more striking: 16 – 7. The further fate of Natus Vincere at the tournament will depend on the “last chance” match, which will take place on February 6.
