Aleksib on Natus Vincere’s struggles: “We’ve been the same team for too long.”

Personally, I’m not feeling very well, but I’m trying to focus on the game. I really like that the guys are on such a roll right now. I think makazze, in a way, brought us Cache and Anubis. He was feeling very confident. When you have a player on such a roll, it’s always easy to play.

I think the main problem is that we’ve been playing together for a very long time. You could say we’ve stayed together as a team for too long. As a result, we’ve found ourselves in situations where we’re discussing the same issues for the seventh time. That can be frustrating, and it can be hard to deal with. But now we’ve done the necessary work, and I’m glad we managed to make it to the playoffs. We literally clawed our way out of a hole, and that’s the most important thing ahead of the upcoming Major. There are a lot of positives right now. We need to make the most of this.

We’ve had to overcome so many obstacles this season; there’s been a lot of negativity. That’s why we need to focus on the positives right now. It’s important to remember the mindset we had coming out of practice, how we prepared, and how we handled Spirit. We need to build on these positives heading into the next tournaments and matches, because we know that if we play like this, we can beat the best teams in the world. So there’s no reason to dwell on the negative things that happened to us this season.

If you look back at the start of the year and last season, we had our favorite maps, and we were pretty consistent—winning some of them more often than we lost. But this year, we suddenly started losing the ground we’d gained. We keep losing on our home map and are trying to find our footing again. It’s definitely been tough. We’ve been trying to base our decisions on how our practices went. Of course, we focus on our weaknesses, but we also take into account our opponents, the condition of individual players, and how our practices went.