Joshua ‘Dardoch’ Hartnett has departed from Counter Logic Gaming to rejoin his former outfit, Team Liquid.
The reasons for Hartnett’s departure from CLG’s League of Legends roster seem to be largely behavioural, as seen in this quote from CLG’s announcement.
“Over the course of the split, we found that Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett did not align with our focus on teamwork and culture. We therefore brought in Omar “Omargod” Amin as part of a six-man roster in order to show Dardoch what a group of five people invested in teamwork can accomplish. Dardoch helped the team find their competitive spirit early in the split and we knew that if we could help Dardoch learn to make those sacrifices – we would have the roster we needed to become LCS champions once again. Unfortunately, Dardoch was unwilling to adhere to the set of standards expected of every member of the team.
We have therefore made the difficult decision to part ways with Dardoch. Dardoch was a large factor in why we had our strongest start to a split in a long time. He is a skilled player with a high ceiling for potential, but we decided that we would need to move forward in order to create the best possible position for the team to win an LCS title. Omar is the player who will take us there.”
As you can infer from the quote, Omar ‘Omargod’ Amin from CLG Academy has now been promoted to the team’s starting roster. Amin hasn’t played much for the team this split and his results have notably been more mixed than Dardoch’s.
It seems like, for Hartnett, a lot of teams are shutting their doors to him. His trade from Immortals to CLG at the start of this Summer Split was also down to behavioral issues, and while esports athletes genuinely get a free pass if the talent is there, it seems that in this case people aren’t keen to play with him, which could be harmful to his future career.
Team Liquid seem happy though.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Heeeeee's Baaaaaaaack<a href=”https://twitter.com/Dardochlol">@Dardochlol</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/LetsGoLiquid?src=hash">#LetsGoLiquid</a> <a href=”https://t.co/X8CYp1ZDkA">pic.twitter.com/X8CYp1ZDkA</a></p>— Team Liquid LoL (@TeamLiquidLoL) <a href=”https://twitter.com/TeamLiquidLoL/status/890024299641188352">July 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Team Liquid currently have three junglers on the roster. With Kim ‘Reignover’ Yeu-jin and Rami ‘Inori’ Charagh currently rotating the role between them. It’s unknown how this will continue after the end of the season, or where Hartnett will fit into the rotation at this stage. We’ll find out when Team Liquid take on Hartnett’s former team Immortals on July 28.