Yatoro on Spirit’s first series at the 2026 Dota 2 Esports World Cup: “The second game turned out to be tougher.”
Team Spirit carry Ilya “Yatoro” Mulyarchuk summarized the match against MOUZ on the organization’s Telegram channel following the first day of the group stage at the 2026 Esports World Cup in Dota 2.
The quote is reproduced with the source’s spelling and punctuation intact
Hello, everyone. We tied 1-1.
The first map was very tough; our opponents really tried to run us over. Basically, MOUZ is a pretty fast-paced team—they managed to shut down our easy lane, but we had two strong other lanes, which allowed us to stage a comeback. The second game turned out to be even tougher; I think they have very strong picks. They managed to get a pretty fast Puck, a pretty fast Tidehunter, and Razor came out of the lane very easily—it was very difficult for us to play against them. Basically, they shut down all three lanes, and it was already hard to make a comeback from there.
We’ll draw our conclusions and play tomorrow—come out and cheer us on.
The Dota 2 Esports World Cup 2026 is taking place in Paris from July 7 to 19. Team Spirit received a direct invite as the winner of the previous tournament; another 12 teams qualified through the ESL Pro Tour rankings; and the remaining 11 spots were filled by teams that performed well in the regional qualifiers.
