mithR on JijieHao’s elimination from the EWC 2026 CS2 tournament: “We should be proud just for having made it to the main stage at all.”

I feel like we didn’t quite live up to our own expectations. Maybe it’s because we suddenly had expectations. I mean, we came to Paris just hoping to make it through the qualifiers, and a good result in the qualifiers would have been enough for us. But then we made it to the main event and beat Team Spirit. I don’t know—we played so well in that game, we were all pushing each other to the limit, and it’s… I don’t know exactly what happened, but we need to reevaluate all of this. We should be proud just for making it to the main stage. And there are a few important lessons here. So, even though we’re not ready for Tier 1 yet, we can definitely take things from this tournament that will help us get even better by the next one.

It was the match against Team Spirit. But the qualifiers were just as tough for us. We played a total of nine maps non-stop on the last day. Obviously, defeating what was, at the time, the best team in the world—at least according to the VRS rankings—was a really big deal for us. And we earned a lot of points. So now we really have a chance to possibly qualify for a Major if we perform well at a few other tournaments. There were many reasons to be proud. The whole atmosphere within the team and the effort the guys put in—coming back to practice every day, reviewing demos, creating new strategies, updating the playbook, and helping each other get through the tough times. 

Individually, we can definitely play at the same high level in some of those, you know, head-to-head matchups we have against some of these teams. But we’re lacking so many fundamental elements in our game. We make too many solo decisions—too many, let’s say, small individual mistakes when it comes to decision-making. We don’t have enough good exchanges. And we also need to work on our playbook to figure out how not to give up the advantage so easily. So there are a lot of things we need to try to work on. But I’m glad to see that in some back-and-forth battles and some individual plays that certain players are willing to make, this is starting to show. That’s definitely the first thing we need to focus on. There are a lot of takeaways from this. But there’s no doubt that we’re the least experienced team in this tournament. And I think that was evident in the match against Aurora Gaming, as well as in the game we played against GamerLegion. So there’s no easy path. We just need to grind our way through.