Rumour: Talon fancies a return with AZR and an Australian Roster

As reported by MIRAA from HLTV, Talon are seeking to pick up their initial roster for CS2. The Hong Kong based organisation has a Valorant and League of Legends team. It seems like they wish to expand into CS2 with AZR as their IGL.

AZR is a well-decorated IGL while he was in Renegades/100T and made it to a major semi-final where they were defeated by eventual runners-up, Avangar at the Berlin StarLadder Major.

Talon were looking to pick up Hazr and Addict from Bad News Kangaroos and Nettik from Rooster. They were looking to go international with the awper by picking up hades.

My first take is that what are Talon expecting with this roster? What are they looking for? Given their previous rosters with League of Legends and Valorant that have secured deep runs in international events, do they expect this roster to do the same?

Nettik, hazr and addict are few of the top riflers in ANZ Region. But would they feature well within the upper echleons? Would they even make it within the Tier 2 scene? There are so many questions and the answers according to me would be no.

A lot of their international experience is being basically 0–2'd and 0–3'd internationally. I don’t think adding on AZR whose own performances in Sprout were sorely lacking and worse than currently underfire IGL, Hooxi and worse than Karrigan.

The only person with any sort of success was hades when he was in ENCE. I am feeling that if hades starts to feel that the project could be a waste of time. He is most likely going to take the first offer that he gets.

What is the plan?

I sound very negative about the entire project but it is important to see where Talon is going shift if hades doesn’t work out. I see a very high chance that this team will be hard-stuck Tier 2 for awhile.

Also, what are they going to do with AZR? AZR has likely 1–2 years maybe even less in him. Who will they pick up as an IGL afterwards? Fortunately, they can pick internationally due to hazr, nettik and ADDICT.

There are a few journeyman IGLs still out there such as cadian, MSL and a few others that can call in English.

If they look to Australia then why didn’t they just pick up Rooster? You have Chelleos as the AWP IGL and you can simply add hazr and ADDICT by removing TJP and dangeR. asap is an amazing rifler and definitely up there with hazr and ADDICT.

To be frank, I assume they went international with the AWP given that ANZ’s awping stocks are pretty slim compared to Europe. I assume Talon would always look international for awping unless dpr or pain improve considerably.

DJL is a great coach and built the initial building blocks for GamerLegion to get where they are at now. Grabbing either DJL or even Xist is massive for Talon.

To be completely honest, it just feels like Talon are just throwing a team together with very little thought being put into it. The key pieces could fall apart quite quickly.

My opinion on the Talon Rumours?

I don’t think much thought has gone into this roster on how they wish to build it out and what their expectations are.

I can see this roster lasting less than a year due to poor initial roster and it’ll likely be a surprise to nobody.

I think the key aspects that they need to consider is that they need to look for an awper in the APAC region. It is going to be incredibly unlikely that a European Awper will stick around unless there is initial success within the first year.

Also, they’ll need to find a different in-game leader because I don’t think AZR’s stats will stack up. If Talon bases themselves in Europe, they can easily reach for MSL or Cadian.

However, if they base themselves in Europe. They could have really picked up any European team and wouldn’t have to deal with getting VISAs for their Australian players.

As I said above, it is highly unlikely their rumoured roster would experience any success in Tier 1 and would most likely be hardstuck in Tier 2. I appreciate the gesture to build a roster within ANZ. However, it needs to have steady foundations to build off instead of falling apart in its infancy.