Sentinels stars respond to backlash over Valorant Champions extended delay

Sentinels stars Tyson ‘TenZ’ Ngo and Shahzeb ‘ShahZaM’ Khan responded to backlash after their 2-1 series win over FURIA at Valorant Champions that came after a lengthy tech pause delay.

Sentinels’ match against FURIA on Day 2 of Valorant Champions 2021 was hit with a tech delay at the climax of the series.

Riot’s VCT staff paused the game during FURIA’s comeback bid which saw the team within three rounds of forcing overtime on the final map on Haven.

Both NA stars disagreed with the circumstances surrounding the tech delay and expressed their confusion. Meanwhile, Valorant fans believe the extended pause derailed FURIA’s momentum on the deciding map of the series.

“I’m getting a lot of hate about the tech pause,” ShahZaM said after the match. “Riot made the pause to investigate a potential ‘exploit’ FURIA did.

“We said we didn’t care and wanted to just play. I just asked to pee since it was taking so long.”

TenZ responds to tech pause vs FURIA

The highly competitive series between the Brazilians and NA’s best was delayed for nearly 15 minutes as Riot investigated the exploit in question.

TenZ was baffled by the decision after the admins explained what they were looking into which boiled down to a jumping trick allowing defenders to mount the middle box on Haven C site.

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“Also for tech pause,” TenZ began. “Riot paused the game because they said that FURIA did an exploit by jumping on top of the C box without updraft.

“[In my opinion], that’s not an exploit since it’s a skill jump that can be done with any character so idk why they paused for so long… please don’t send hate DMs to my teammates for something Riot did.”

VCT tech pause confusion

The sequence of events happened fast. After Sentinels lost Round 20 to make the game 12-8, the NA side used one of its timeouts.

This gave FURIA’s Alexandre ‘xand’ Zizi (Jett) plenty of time to get up on C site’s center boxes without needing to use one of his two Updrafts.

Shortly after the round began, xand was forced off the position and was fragged moments later. FURIA still managed to clutch the 4v5 and make the scoreline 12-9.

Then Riot paused the game via a tech timeout and here’s where people started to question the delay. That confusion would later turn into ire when Sentinels eventually ended the series and the org tweeted out a cheeky bit of banter in Portuguese.

Five minutes into the break, ShahZaM can be seen heading off-stage since he was allowed to go to the bathroom during the tech break. This sparked even more angst against Sentinels since spectators believed it was a rule violation and suspected favoritism that only served to delay the game even longer.

“[Riot] tech paused and let ShahZaM go take a piss,” Vivo Keyd’s Gabriel ‘v1xen’ Martins said according to a translation. “In [our game at Masters Berlin] vs KRU, they didn’t let [Olavo ‘heat’ Marcelo] go.”

ShahZaM cleared up his end of the situation after head coach of Brazil’s Havan Liberty, Ricardo ‘rik’ Furquim, explained why the sudden bathroom break was looked down on.

“Hey bro, the tech pause is okay,” rik said in a tweet. “We don’t enjoy the pee idea, because when it happened to us they denied that offer, even that the pause was taking a year to end.”

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The Sentinels IGL responded: “Yeah I remember being denied in Iceland as well, but I asked and they said yes. We were still waiting for Riot to resume for a while after I got back.”

Riot Games has yet to respond to the situation.