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Following his side’s loss to BLG in the first round of the bracket stage, Cloud9’s Ibrahim “Fudge” Allami made clear his preferred opponent as they now make their way to the MSI 2023 lower bracket.

When asked by Esports.net about his preference for tomorrow’s matchup between fellow LCS side Golden Guardians and China’s JD Gaming, the loser of which will face Cloud9 on Sunday, the top laner chuckled that:

“I definitely want GG to lose tomorrow, I don’t think I want to play against JDG.”

This comes after three days of Eastern dominance over Western counterparts that has seen G2, MAD Lions and now Cloud9 all fall to the lower bracket at the hands of GEN.G, T1 and Bilibili Gaming respectively. Talking in a media scrum after C9’s series, Fudge explained his thoughts on the East vs West gap.

“I do think the difference is that big… Even though we got so far ahead in early games, which you could argue was from coinflip plays or them [BLG] making mistakes, they still played a lot cleaner than us – even when we were ahead. So if you can’t even win games when you’re ahead, it’s pretty clear that they’re a lot better than you. So I would definitely say that the gap is quite big still.“

Source: Twitter | @Lolesports

Fudge went on to admit that he was somewhat anxious heading into the BLG series, particularly going up against Chen “Bin” Ze-Bin in a lane matchup that was billed to be the one to watch on the day.

“I was a little bit nervous because you could argue he’s the best top laner in the world…  I think that he’s very aggressive, he punishes you on every mistake. He sometimes makes random errors where he gets caught by a jungler or a mid-laner, but in general he’s going to win 1v1 in a lot of the matchups. He plays all the matchups a lot better.”

The three-time LCS champion was able to find positives in the defeat, despite failing to pick up a single win in the series.

“We got quite ahead in the early game in a lot of the games and our mid-games were quite poor. We over-grouped a lot of the times, went for really random plays and got caught randomly and it led to us slowly losing gold all over the map. A lot of teamfights, I think, were misplayed, especially in games one and two, so it just led to us losing those games.” he continued with: “There was a whole lot of problems in all three games, but I think that our early games were decent.”

Read next: MSI 2023 - Schedule, Standings & Results