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FORTALEZA, Brazil -- Mario Balotelli was sent home from the Confederations Cup on Monday due to a strained thigh, leaving Italy without its top striker for both the semifinal vs. Spain and the final or third-place match. Having already been ruled out of Thursdays semifinal, Italy coach Cesare Prandelli decided to send Balotelli home after consulting with team physician Enrico Castellacci. "I feel like a loser leaving this way. I would have liked to stay but theres the Champions League preliminary round so Ive got to take care of myself," Balotelli said upon leaving the team hotel, referring to matches in August with AC Milan. "Anyhow my teammates will do well even without me." Balotelli injured his left quadriceps during Italys 4-2 loss to Brazil on Saturday. He has been the Azzurris most explosive player in the tournament so far, scoring the winner in a 2-1 victory over Mexico, converting a penalty in the 4-3 win over Japan and setting up a goal for Emanuele Giaccherini against Brazil. "Hes obviously very upset but theres just not enough time for him to return," Prandelli said, adding that the decision was made without any pressure from Milan. "We just used good sense." Castellacci said that Milans medical staff will take over treatment. "I checked out Balotelli this morning and, considering his condition, I dont think he will be able to recuperate before the final," Castellacci said. "Its not worth taking more risks." Balotelli is the second Italy player sent home since the Brazil match, with fullback Ignazio Abate -- who also plays for Milan -- having left Sunday with a dislocated right shoulder. Meanwhile, midfielder Andrea Pirlo, who sat out Saturdays match with Brazil due to a muscle problem, continued to train separately from the rest of the squad. "Pirlo continues to work out and were optimistic but we need to evaluate him day by day and we wont decide whether he can play until the last minute," Castellacci said. In a bit of positive news, midfielder Riccardo Montolivo has fully recuperated from a knock to the head and trained regularly Monday. Alberto Gilardino would seem to be Balotellis logical replacement if Prandelli sticks with his single-striker lineup. Or he could use several forwards such as Emanuele Giaccherini, Stephan El Shaarawy, Sebastian Giovinco, Alessio Cerci or Alessandro Diamanti. "Without Mario well have to work much more collectively so well work more on that," Prandelli said. "We have a few problems but the squad is responding well despite the difficulties." Comprar Vans Baratas España .J. -- Marty Brodeur beat the Pittsburgh Penguins yet again. Zapatillas Vans Baratas . - Goaltender Philippe Desrosiers of the Rimouski Oceanic has broken a shutout record that was only three months old in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. http://www.vansbaratasoutlet.es/ . Defenceman Yannick Weber scored the go-ahead goal early in the third period and the Canucks breathed a sigh of relief with a 2-1 win on Saturday night. Zapatillas Vans Venta Online . Dusautoir, the former World Player of the Year, sustained a torn bicep playing for Toulouse in the Heineken Cup on Saturday. The flanker, who has played 65 times for France, is expected to be out for up to four months. Vans España Outlet .5 seconds to play in the game, Kevin Love never stopped believing that they would come out of there with a win. Blizzards newest game, Overwatch, officially launched last month and had seven million players within a week of release. Whats more, this is a game that went the traditional sales route rather than the increasingly common free-to-play one, meaning that all those players plopped down a minimum of $40 to play.Even before launch, there were a healthy number of professional Overwatch tournaments, populated by some of the biggest teams in esports. With Overwatchs audience growing and Blizzards focus on increasing the competitiveness of the game -- as evidenced by the games just-released Competitive Mode -- theres an opportunity for Overwatch to flourish as an esport. Any spectator sport, whether its hitting a ball with a large stick or dispensing an animated fighter with a Shoryuken, quickly develops its own internal strategies and trends as players become more experienced and the sport more refined. In gaming, we refer to this as the meta, an endlessly evolving state that forms the backbone of tactics employed in the game.We finish our introduction to the heroes and their competitive roles with the four five support heroes. Rarely flashy and even more rarely the subject of kill streak highlight reels on YouTube, the support heroes, and more accurately, the healers, are indispensable from high-level competition to your average pickup game.MercyThe most straight-up healer, Mercy is an absolute staple in every game mode now that were starting to see rules against Lúcio stacking in some maps. Situations where a team wont run a Mercy are few-and-far-between, limited mostly to last-ditch Hail Mary pushes where a player goes all-aggressive attack or the very rare King of the Hill situation in which youve gone with only a single Lúcio as the healer.While Mercy is a fairly straightforward character, it would be a mistake to think of her as a low-skill character. What makes a good Mercy competitor isnt reflexes or amazing aim, but situational and positional awareness. Not getting killed while focusing on preventing your teammates from not getting killed requires well-honed instincts about when to cut bait in a situation.A Mercy also shines when she has a well-coordinated team, which top teams tend to be. Shes not a mass healer in the way Lúcio is, and you get the most out of her when damage is spread to as few of your teammates as possible. In a pickup game with strangers, Lúcio is arguably better, but in competitive games, Mercys near-100 percent usage rate is for very good reason.Best maps: Uh...OverwatchLúcioAnd here we have the other main healer. While Mercy thrives in organization, Lúcio excels in chaos. Lúcio cant burst-heal an individual to the same degree that Mercy can (his ultimate, Sound Barrier, can probably be best described as burst-invulnerability), but he can keep most -- or all -- of his team well-maintained in a brutal firefight.Lúcio is a regular pick as the second healer in most situations, but King of the Hill maps tend to show off his wide-ranging skills the most. With a better ability to defend himself from flankers in this non-linear map mode and the Soundwaves for a measure of crowd control, its here that Lúcio provides something that Mercy really cant.And Soundwaving a player off the map to their death is pretty cool, too.Best maps: All the King of the HillsZenyattaNo hero saw his role fall further in the closed beta than Zenyatta. A hybrid offense/defense character, Zenyattas Orbs of Harmmony and Discord were versatile, allowing a roaming flanker to get healed far away from Zenyatta and a Discorded enemy to have a persistent debuff until Zenyatta or they died.dddddddddddd Given this flexibility, Zenyatta was a staple of competitive play in the early beta. Blizzard attempted to deal with this by increasing the number of abilities that could remove the Discord orb.In the end, Zenyatta got the full brunt of the nerf hammer, making it so that both orbs were removed if a player was out of the line of his sight for three seconds. Or to put it bluntly, Blizzard added a hard counter to Zenyatta: a wall.This reduced Zenyattas utility to the point that hes essentially fallen out of favor in competitive games.There may be some hope for Zenyatta, though. Blizzard increased his survivability by bumping his base shields, increased the projectile speed of the orbs, and increased both his movement speed and his healing power in his Transcendence ultimate. Will this be enough to get Zenyatta back into the meta? Not holding my breath, but there will hopefully be some experimentation.Best map: None right nowSymmetraIn pub games, Symmetra has a few interesting roles. Against less-experienced players, excellent turret placement can be annoying and her Photon Projector goes through shields and can destroy Torbj?rn turrets and inattentive Bastions.In competitive games, Symmetra has exactly one role: early in payload maps on defense, building a teleporter to help the team with the long travel distances. Without a quick teleporter, an attacker early in a payload map has a de facto numerical edge because the time required for the attacker to get back into the fight after a respawn is much less than that of a defender. Symmetra neutralizes this once she gets her teleporter up, buying the team valuable time.Best maps: Dorado, Hollywood, Route 66, Kings RowAnaIts far too early to tell exactly how Ana, Overwatchs first post-launch hero, will fare in competitive play. She was just officially released on Tuesday, after all. So we have to make some educated guesses.Whats interesting about Ana is her versatility. She can do long-range damage as well as long-range healing, her Biotic Grenade acts as a form of indirect crowd control in that it hampers an enemy healer from healing their team for a few seconds. The Sleep Dart can situationally hamper an opponent, so long as a teammate doesnt wake them up with damage. I expect Ana to be a lot of fun to play in Quickplay and the built-in competitive mode.At high levels? The outlook is foggier. With only six players on a team, theres an emphasis on picking heroes based on their strongest attribute in order to cause exploitable mismatches. A team is not likely to run three healers and her skillset means shes not as strong at healing individual targets as Mercy or as strong at healing mass targets as Lúcio.So for her to displace one of the healers, what she does outside of straight-up healing has to be extremely powerful. Pre-nerf Zenyattas persistent orbs were extremely powerful, so he saw play. Is being like Widowmaker with a sniper rifle and short-term enemy debuffs enough? Im not so sure, but I hope Im wrong as it would be nice to see the Mercy/Lúcio stranglehold be released a bit, creating more dynamic team composition decisions.Best maps: TBA ' ' '