ruggah on expectations for the IEM Cologne Major: “We wanted to advance to at least the third stage”
Daria Ushakova
Astralis coach Kasper “ruggah” Dew listed the problems the team faced throughout the event in an interview at the IEM Cologne Major 2026 and admitted that the team’s expectations for the tournament had been higher.
On Astralis’s struggles at the tournament
Throughout the tournament, we made too many small mistakes that we couldn’t recover from at crucial moments. We couldn’t turn the situation around in our favor. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong on Overpass; I could see that things were obviously going badly, but I don’t know what exactly was off in our microgame. It’s always frustrating to take few rounds on attack, as happened to us. So there were several factors here: we weren’t landing our shots, and we weren’t reading the opponent.
On playing against top-tier teams
When you play against good teams, there’s always some mind games going on: they try to guess what we’re going to do, and we try to stay one step ahead. <...> But a lot went wrong throughout the entire event, and that’s very sad.
On expectations for IEM Cologne Major 2026
We had high expectations; we wanted to make it to at least the third stage and face the best teams in the world. It didn’t work out this time, but we’re still a young team that transitioned from a Danish squad to an international one at the start of the year.
Earlier, Astralis exited the IEM Cologne Major 2026 after losing in the decisive match of the tournament’s second stage. Rasmus “HooXi” Nielsen’s team faced off against paiN Gaming and lost in straight maps: 11-13 on Nuke and 4-13 on Overpass.
Photo — Rachel Mathews, BLAST.
Daria Ushakova
