ash: “I was pleasantly surprised by the energy within the team.”

I think our opponents played really well. Because of our limited set of strategies at this stage, they were able to easily read and “expose” our plans, and we simply didn’t have an answer for that. At the same time, our opponents actively used a two-AWP setup and literally destroyed us all over the map. I clearly felt how much our lack of practice affected our performance—at crucial moments toward the end of the match, we simply lacked confidence.

To be honest, picking this map was a risk from the start. We’d been practicing it for a while and planned to officially add it to our map pool. However, every time we play a new map for the first time in a tournament, the team gets really nervous. Because of this, we forget a lot of the things we’d worked on in practice, and this time, history repeated itself exactly. This has happened with all of our maps. I hope we’ll solve this problem in the future, though there are already some promising signs. I think we let the victory slip away ourselves by letting our opponent “get off the hook.” We could have beaten our opponents. I think we’re more disappointed with our performance on Ancient than with our offensive play on Mirage.

I think communication is the number one issue. Coaches often use this cliché, but we really did have too many difficulties with communication. In some matches, and especially during practice, we managed to complicate even the simplest situations out of nowhere. Nevertheless, we’ve made tremendous progress in this area. I think it’s precisely thanks to our effective communication that we were ultimately able to win today—I was very pleased with that aspect. Obviously, we still have a long way to go; right now, we’re only taking our first tentative steps. And while the need to improve communication may seem like a cliché, the current changes look promising.

I’d say we look very solid on defense—at the moment, our play on that end looks really great. Besides, I was pleasantly surprised by the energy within the team. To be honest, I didn’t even realize how emotional and fired up the guys can get during games, and it’s awesome to watch. Everyone is genuinely fighting for each other. There are plenty of positives—our entire tactical board is literally covered with them. At the same time, the team still has its share of weaknesses. We need to gradually iron out these mistakes from our play, which will inevitably happen over time through communication and detailed post-game analyses. Under high pressure on the decisive third map, when the score was tight, our weaknesses really came to the surface, but that was probably to be expected.