27 years and 196 days - that’s how old Faker was when he won his fourth Global Finals title.
At the just-concluded 2023 League of Legends Global Finals, T1 eSports Club swept WBG eSports Club in the finals with a lopsided score of 3:0 to win the fourth Summoner’s Trophy in team history.
At the same time, the match also set a number of records for T1 and T1’s mid laner Faker - for example, it was T1’s 100th victory in the World Series, which is in keeping with this year’s theme of “A Hundred Pieces of Gold”; Faker surpassed the record of last year’s champion Deft, becoming the oldest player in the history of the World Championship at the time of winning the title; Faker’s fourth title is seven years after the third (2016 Global Finals), which is a time span that is almost impossible to surpass in the future…….
But any number of statistics and records pale in comparison to what Faker has accomplished in the history of League of Legends eSports. Invited by Fighter, we also traveled to Seoul’s Takasagi Sky Dome Stadium today. In the crowd of players, I saw a variety of T1 uniforms of different styles and eras, most of which had the ID “Faker” printed on the back.
Faker’s image on the big screen would bring out the loudest cheers from the crowd.
It’s not often that a single player in eSports - even at the GOAT level - can fully represent a program, but Faker does. In S3, he was the young talented mid laner out of OGN; in S5 and S6, he was the Archdemon representing LCK’s hegemony; but in the years following the S7 Bird’s Nest loss, both Faker and T1 (SKT) seemed to go into a period of hibernation, with rumors of club court battles, declining individual performances, and Worlds tickets stuttering …… Many people Many people feel that Faker has reached the end of his days.
Even T1’s most promising S12, they lost to DRX, the fourth seed in the same region, in the finals. even if the original team is playing for another year, T1’s official tournament results before this year’s Worlds are hardly satisfactory.
What no one expected was that Faker, along with his four young teammates, would blossom even more brightly in S13, and that he himself would cash in on a decade of diligence, self-discipline, and humility for a fourth championship trophy.
As a reporter and viewer of the LPL, seeing this S3 assassin heroes known as the genius of the center single, until S13 on the field, still have the courage and operation in the final deciding game to pull out the Akali assassin heroes to win, my heart’s emotions are very complex.
Even though we all thought that there was a certain gap between the strength of WBG and T1 before the match, almost no one thought that the final picture would be such a four-line GAP crushing game, which made the LPL audience from “regretful” to “convinced”. In the field of e-sports, we have seen too many talented players in the shape of the arch-enemy theory, but the real “ten years of the enemy”, round and round, in the end, or Faker’s old face - Moreover, it seems far from the end.
“The third title is for myself, the fourth title is for my teammates,” Faker said today. The “four little ones”, led by the spirit of T1, are still young.
I saw countless T1 fans writing “3:0” on their support boards at the Sky Dome before the start of the tournament. This was what many people expected from T1 vs DRX last year - a year later, they and their home team finally got the most satisfying ending. And the loudest applause, in the end, belonged to Faker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR-qe3eiWNE
https://www.gameleap.com/news/lol-worlds-2023-finals-t1-vs-wbg-results-and-recap
