A historic fairytale run sees professional esports team, Team Flash successfully defend the EACC championship title on behalf of Singapore – the competition that put Singapore on the world map for esports earlier this year in April.
A Star-Studded Lineup
Kicking off on 10 November in Seoul, the group stages saw a combined Singapore-Malaysian (SAM) contingent consisting of two Singaporeans both representing Team Flash: Fardeen “Fardhino” Hussain, 21 and Amraan “Amraan” Gani, 24. The third member of team SAM was represented by Malaysia’s top professional player, Darren “RippedJean” Gan, 21, who is contracted to esports team Mineski.
Fardhino was a newly signed player on Team Flash’s roster this season, and qualified as Singapore’s official representative with defending champion Amraan at the EACC Singapore national qualifier in September.
Fighting with Grit and Determination
Starting slow in the tournament’s group stages on 10 & 11 November, team SAM narrowly managed a 2nd place finish just behind China’s Lyon EDG with 1 win and 5 draws after 6 games played. Maintaining an undefeated streak in the groups, the team qualified as second seed for the knockout stages in Busan from 16 – 17 November.
Facing off against tournament favorites Adidas X from Korea in the quarter-finals, the Singaporean-Malaysian contingent went 2:1 with Singapore’s Amraan scoring the decisive goal to knock the Koreans out of the tournament.
Up next in the semi-finals was Thailand, a rematch of the grand finals back in April. Once again proving dominant, team SAM emerged victorious against the Thais with a convincing 2:0 score-line to progress to their second consecutive EACC grand finals.
In the final against Vietnam, Singapore’s Fardhino first went 1-0 down before team SAM clawed back the next 3 games in succession through Malaysia’s RippedJean – resulting in a final 3-1 score-line to team SAM in the grand finals.
Defending champion and two-time, back-to-back EACC champion Amraan had this to say: “We came in wanting to show we deserved our success from April, and we did it. Thanks to my teammates Fardeen and Darren for an amazing tournament, and we are happy that we did Singapore esports proud again on the international stage.”
