I was going to do a typical blog, about how practice has been going in the run up to iseries and how weve settled back into being in infused. But im not, as id find myself falling asleep whilst writing it.

Instead I want to talk about the year that weve already had as a team, just to give you guys a chance to get to know all of us a bit better!

In fact, this particular team has been around since about i30; which is way back in April 2007. We were a particularly new team which consisted of me (rai), craig (farley), baz (drazah) matt (zesty, not exume :D) and dave (d2k). We had only been a team for about a month and had really struggled to get any sort of results, but we turned up to i30 looking to release the beast from within. We actually managed to do this with a placing of 5th/6th after beating the newly names team-eBuyer and losing a close game to reason 16-11. Anyway, that was a while a go and things changed, we attended i31, tex, CGS and i32 by the end of year.

During the christmas period, me and craig left the active infused roster due to many different reasons, he joined up with TLR for a short stint and I just chilled out and had a nice few months off as after hardcoring source for wellover 6months had taken its toll!

But I soon got the css bug back, so me and farley re-started the lineup that was originally picked up by infused. Some of the guys didnt last long due to other commitments, so we recruted in 2 new players to play alongside myself, craig and zesty. These would be Kentish and pez,. both experienced players from good gaming backgrounds. In May 2008 we attended LAN79 with this lineup and lost out to a formidable Alternate Attax squad, and the newly formed Guns4hire - here we placed 9th/12th and it was a good platform in which we could base our team.

However the organisation we had been playing under, had a one big hidden secret. Where the manager that we knew as Superfly, was infact an old owner of Eurocss called xXhanubis. He decided to organise a LAN tournament - which took interest from all over Europe with all the top teams of the time attending. It was to be a big step towards the future of css LAN wise. But xXhanubis had other ideas. He decided not to book the event, or even turn up and infact he ran off with over £3,000 in LAN entry from all the teams and complete disappeared. Thankfully Gom8z from twistedplay saved the event and we've loved him ever since. So obviously we didnt  want to be associated with them, so we left and created the team under a new name, XONE.

As with many teams, a new name meant a few new players. pez, zesty and kentish left (kentish had issues at the time, but he was to return after i34). We picked up drazah, who had played with us previously and 2 other well known faces in the css scene - Alex , who had played in the new infused lineup and deadcell who had previously played for Auxilia. With i34 being touted as the most competitive tournament in recent years we knew it would be a tough task, with a seeding of 11th - we knew we had to pull something out of the bag to place above our seed. With the lineup being relatively new we werent expecting miracles but we expected a good performance. We cruised through the group stages and beat exult (16-5), TCM (16-14) in the first few rounds of the upper bracket, this would be where our tournament would end - we were beaten by Reason and k1ck respectively and finished with a placing of 9th/12th. Although the route we had was a difficult one, we knew we should have performed slightly better and felt we didnt give a full showing of how we can perform.

Rosters changes are always fun, and we had yet more changes after i34. To replace the fallen gamers of i34, deadcell and alex, we picked up ace-- and Exume. Aaron (ace--) and ExumE (matt)  have actually fitted right into the team with aaron participating with us at the recent PCGamer event where we came close to beating Reason on nuke!

With no real awper in the team, matt was an obvious choice for our primary awper. Having played in TCM he had the experience and knowledge that we needed from our main frag department. With his awp and the rest of us running around shooting heads I can see i35 shaping up to be a great event and i look forward to meeting all you new Infused members at the bar!

So yeah, there we have it. The blog in the life of a hardcore CSS team!

xx rai