Japan vs Australia | Overwatch World Cup 2017 Esports Highlights

With Sweden having secured their spot at BlizzCon 2017 with their 3-0 win over Spain, Japan and Australia close out the day fighting to see who will keep their Overwatch World Cup 2017 run alive.

If you asked anyone before the start of the event who were the favorites to move onto BlizzCon, Australia would one team that would come to mind. When putting Japan up against Australia, the latter would have been the crowd favorites seeing as they are the hometown heroes and are made up of the roster of Blank Esports who have months of experience playing together. However, in just two short days, Japan has made some new fans and have gone from the underdogs to a team that had a decent shot at advancing to the next stage. Their wins against Sweden and the 2-2 tie with Finland showed the world that this team was here to compete and could take on some of the best players in the world.

The series opened with a King's Row win for Australia who was able to stop the Japanese payload from reaching the second checkpoint. Japan selected their comfort pick map of Lijiang Tower and despite losing the first round to Australia, they were able to secure their first point in the series after taking Control Center and Night Market. Heading to Volskaya, Australia were able to pull off yet another strong defense to deny Japan Point B after a successful double point capture of their own while on Attack. A win on Dorado for Japan evened up the series and Oasis was chosen as the final stage to determine who would be heading to Anaheim this fall.

With so much on the line, both teams brought out everything they had. As both teams traded maps back and forth it was anyone's game. In the end, Australia on the back of a clutch Pulsebomb from IEATUUP closed out the series and punched in Australia's ticket for BlizzCon.

The Overwatch World Cup is an international tournament with the national teams from the 32 participating countries battling it out over the course of the summer in four separate qualifiers around the world hosted in China, Australia, Poland, and the United States.

Two groups will compete at each of the Group Stage qualifiers in a Round Robin format with the top from each group moving onto a single elimination bracket. Each series features four maps with teams seeded based on average Skill Rating. Map priority is given to the higher seeded team for the first map of the series. It is important to remember that these matches are not a best-of-three series and will focus on winning as many maps as possible as the two teams with the most points by the end of the Round Robin stage will advance to the next round,

The first place team from each group will play the second place team in the opposite group. The winners of this stage will move on to the live playoffs at BlizzCon 2017.

The Japan team consists of

Aktm ta1yo dearth Jasper Yoz CLAIRE

Australia's national team is as follows

Jason " ieatuup" Ho Ajay "Aetar" Umasankar Ashley "Trill" Powell Marcus "Kiki" Jacob Andrew "Rqt" Haws Jordan "Gunba" Graham

Chapters

0:00 King's Row first half

1:14 King's Row final push

2:54 Oasis city center

3:58 Oasis garden

5:44 Lijiang Tower

7:10 Map 4 battle

9:21 Dorado attack

10:43 Dorado defense

12:08 Dorado overtime

13:22 Final map and series end