EPT
I’m here with zonic, the coach of Astralis, who had to stand-in in place of dupreeh after his health problems earlier in the major. First of all, I want to come back to that game against Virtus.Pro because you made it really close in both games; that went to overtime, 19-17 and 19-15. Can you walk me through these games, how were you feeling as the series developed?
zonic: For me personally it was a pretty tough match. There’s no doubt that these players, all nine of them, spend hundreds of hours each week playing this game. So for me it was kind of difficult going through the games with an all time eight hundred hours playing. As the game for the team, I think we all performed actually. Some of the right players carried the team; we saw device, and even gla1ve stepped up. I’m extremely proud of how they played. Obviously we shouldn’t have picked Overpass, because dupreeh is pretty much 80% of our T side. He’s always getting these opening kills, trying to open up the map. I couldn’t take over his role, and we pretty much only could rely on device. So that gave us some issues, but we managed to come back on the CT side. On Train we did quite well and then as T we pretty much were lost, without ideas. Some close round that could have gone our way and won us the game, bringing it to a third map. Looking back at it, I think that we could’ve won 2-0 actually. But if we played the game again they would probably win with a bigger margin because they were a better team than us. Maybe not in that match, but when you compare the lineups, they are a better team.
I’d like to talk about the nostalgia when going into that match. You tweeted a photo of you playing in an old LAN; in this game you were against VP, TaZ and his men, who were one of your oldest opponents from the times when you played in mTw. How was your experience playing in this game against them?
It was fun, obviously. It was good to be back but I think it was a bit sad that it was under these circumstances; I haven’t played a single match since E-League and that’s over a month ago. I haven’t even played a matchmaking match because, besides coaching Astralis which is a full time job, I’m also a father and I have a wife. So whenever I have some spare at home I’ll spend it with my family. Obviously it was a bit difficult but it was great to be back and I even got a huge hug from TaZ when we finished the match, on stage. It was good fighting him again even though we lost.
How do you prepare as a team in this situation? First of all you didn’t have Kjaerbye for the major because of the roster rules, and you had to bring in gla1ve. Then dupreeh can’t play and you have to stand-in. How do you adapt? How do you construct a game plan around that?
We didn’t even have time to make a game plan. Obviously, we bootcamped with gla1ve for five days up to the event. I think we managed to integrate him to the team as good as we could. When we then got the news about dupreeh, I remember that, around 6:00pm he got some stomach ache and then we got to the hospital, me, Xyp’, and dupreeh. Then around 10 o’clock in the evening the doctor said that he would have to go through surgery. I then drove him to another hospital; I got home like 2:00am and I just wrote on our Facebook group that he couldn’t play and that I was going to play. It was tough; we pretty much just talked around breakfast in the morning about gameplan stuff, and yeah. It was tough.
Talking about gameplan, karrigan said in an interview around May that you were going to focus on Nuke and make it one of your best map. In this major, you come in and ban it every single time. Why?
Obviously we didn’t have time to play with gla1ve; we only had five days, so we pretty much just used our old maps, the usual maps that we are playing. We haven’t had time to play Nuke, we had so many events going on and one of our reason for failing these group stage at the ECS in London and the ESL Pro League comes down to us attending too many events. And that comes down to the fact that we didn’t have time to play Nuke. So in hindsight it has been a mistake for us not to play Nuke because I think it’s important to have a good map pool nowadays. It’s more important than previously. Based on the fact that we only had five days with gla1ve we decided to ban Nuke and Cobblestone all the time. It was also because we knew Dignitas were good on Nuke, they play it really well and they’re not afraid of playing it. So that wasn’t reasonable for us to play it.
Alright. Coming back to gla1ve, so you brought him in as a stand-in and he actually delivered on stage! Were you expecting him to play so good against teams of that caliber?
Hmm, not to play that good. That’s for sure. He had a decent game against Dignitas, and against Gambit. But to see him step up in front of such a crowd, that was just amazing. I’m pretty sure that he has made everyone aware of himself, for the teams, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to get a contract. We couldn’t be more satisfied with him as a stand-in and I’m just so happy that he did such a great job.
Moving on to the topic of coaching. Talking about THREAT, he was kind of the X factor for NiP especially at DreamHack Malmö and it seems to have worn out a bit. As a coach, how do you try to stay relevant and always make a team hard to play against and difficult to predict?
I think some of the teams, and also NiP, maybe played a bit too many events, just like us. I think that in order to keep evolving and making strats you need to have a proper time home to prepare. That is one thing that we have learned, and that is one thing that we will take with us after the summer vacation that we have in August. We’re going to try to attend less events. Obviously there are some [*****] events, and if they are close to each others we will attend it but we’re going to try to have like three weeks of practice between each event if possible. And then just not thinking about the prize money, just thinking about which event is the most prestigeful. I think it’s important to renew ourselves, and the meta is changing quite a lot, so I think that you need to use some hours at home to try to look at yourself and try to anti-strat a little bit; look at your own demos to see what mistakes you’re making.
We recently saw some teams interested in coaches: Team Dignitas brought a new coach not so long ago, FaZe brought in RobbaN, etc. Do you think that today a coach is necessary to a team or that they can still go without one?
I think the teams need to think about what they want from their coach. Obviously I’m not calling for Astralis. I’m helping, I would say that I am karrigan’s right hand. I’m his advisor. If I can see sometimes that his playstyle… when he has an awp for example, and he repeeks, repeeks and it’s a lot stressful and the way that he plays.. he’s extremely offensive and that also affects his way of calling. Sometimes he can stress some of the players and then I’m like the voice of reason. Just saying “ok we need to calm down, we need to stop and wait for our opponents”. I pretty much analyze how they play. I’m kind of an all-around guy on the team. I think that some of the coaches on the other teams are not used correctly. I think you need to know what your purpose with the coach is, and then use him correctly, because some teams need a caller, like THREAT. But other teams need a coach that doesn’t necessarily have to be a caller and can still do a pretty good job as well.
We’ll wrap this up, one last question: you will play with Kjaerbye onwards, what’s in the future for Astralis?
The future will be that we’re going to take a break in August, after E-League and then we’re gonna start, I think in the 20th of August, we’re gonna start playing in the ProLeague. We’re gonna start figuring out what map pool we’re going to have. We’re going to renew all our strats, see which strats we need to maybe skip and not use anymore because they’re outdated. We basically need to reinvent ourselves. Furthermore we’ve made some changes. Karrigan is now full time AWP, we’ve removed device from that role. And then we are playing a lot more structured, a lot more defensively, especially as CT. CT has been our main problem in the past and I think that will help us remove the old chokiness. Also going out of group stages at so many event now has been the result of an ancient problem, we haven’t been able to figure out what kind of team we wanted to be. I think we have found our way now, and we will keep working on that for three or four months.
Alright thanks. Any last words?
I just want to thank you everyone who supported us. It has been a fairytale, because we never expected us to even qualify for the playoffs. So for us to qualify and not go down against VP but actually put up a fight, that has been great to see. And I want to thank all our fans who supported us doing this.
Interviewer: ragnarork
CSS: FO-nTTaX
Graphics: DearDave
Photos: HLTV.org
