Star AWPer and co-founder of Eternal Fire Özgür “woxic” Eker will no longer play for the No. 1 CS:GO team in Turkey, he said in a personal statement today.
Woxic’s decision to bench himself comes after Eternal Fire didn’t reach the IEM Rio Major following a 1-3 campaign in the Europe Regional Major Ranking (A). Since then, the Turkish organization replaced in-game leader Engin “MAJ3R” Küpeli with Yasin “xfl0ud” Koç in early October and parted ways with Ahmet “paz” Karahoca and head coach Canpolat “hardstyle” Yıldıran on Oct. 31.
The AWPer said he’s been thinking about leaving Eternal Fire’s lineup since they were eliminated from ESL Pro League season 16 and failed to qualify for the Major.
“We could not manage to create a structure,” woxic said. “Due to being unstructured we have faced many problems inside of the team, which causes us to have more problems and we could not manage to solve them properly and we decided to continue with updating our roster.”
The former mousesports and Cloud9 dedicated sniper felt that Eternal Fire needed another one or two years to reach their full potential, which affected his motivation “deeply.” After considering his age (24), he has decided to try playing for an international team once more and explore his opportunities in 2023.
Woxic helped put the Eternal Fire project together in August 2021 alongside former BIG star İsmailсan “XANTARES” Dörtkardeş and their main accomplishment was qualifying for the PGL Antwerp Major in May, but they struggled in every single tier-one tournament.
With woxic out of the picture, Eternal Fire is down to just XANTARES, xfl0ud, and Ömer “imoRR” Karataş in the active lineup. It’s unclear if this trio will stick together and find new players after woxic’s departure or if the team will disband heading to 2023. Lots of teams would be interested in adding XANTARES given that he’s been consistently playing well this season.
