AcilioN: "We didn't expect to do well"

SK Gaming arrived to London with only a couple of days of practice following the team's decision to change Nicolai "⁠HUNDEN⁠" Petersen for a new in-game leader, Danny "⁠BERRY⁠" Krüger.

Despite that they were able to take NiP to double overtime on de_cbble, where they would likely win hadn't it been for Aleksi "⁠allu⁠" Jalli's heroics, and 12 rounds on de_inferno. Asger "⁠AcilioN⁠" Larsen answered a couple of questions about the match, as well as the lineup change and SK's match with Titan tomorrow:

Basically, you had both maps in the palm of your hand, why did they slip away?

Well, I think they didn't win the game, we lost the game, because we made so many stupid mistakes. There were so many situations, where we were in a big advantage and we just threw it away. I remember two rounds on Cobblestone, where allu just wrecked us all. 

Did those two aces that allu had impact you mentally?

The first one didn't, really. It was him taking the first kill and killing my teammates, but the second one was like a 5v2 and allu just rushed matrix, the hall, and just shot everybody. We had a 1v2 and we just did stupid mistakes. That lost us the round.

What were your expectations coming into the game in the first place? You just changed an in-game leader.

As you said, we played with BERRY for like five days and we only practiced for like four hours a day. I think we have practiced Cobblestone once. I don't think we have practiced Inferno. We wanted to do our best, of course, but they are a strong team and we didn't expect to do as well as we did. I'm proud of my team at least.

What was the reason for removing HUNDEN and replacing him with BERRY?

HUNDEN is a really nice guy, and he's one of the best teammates I've ever had on a personal level. We tried to tell him that he needs to change the way he calls and generally stuff in-game. We, me and Friis at least, have now played with him for like five months and we haven't seen any improvement. We sat down and told him that either he will make a big change or he would not be on the team anymore. And he said himself that he didn't want to bring the team down and stepped down. It was a mutual decision in the end. We brought in BERRY and I have played with him before at my first international event where we had a team with Kjaerbye and two other players, mupzG and xanzir. We came into the tournament as underdogs and we won the whole thing against encore. I thought that he would be the kind of guy to get our team to do better. I already thing he made a huge progress on the team. A month more, and we could compete and even beat NiP.

Heading into the game tomorrow, are you going to work on your performance now or are you just going to sleep, reset...?

I think we are going to talk about the game and figure out what went wrong and how we should approach the game tomorrow. Of course, think about which maps we think we're going to play and how we're going to play them against Titan. 

Do you think you can take it against Titan?

Titan got owned by dignitas, so I think if we have a really good start, win a pistol round and the third round, they will be mentally tilted, because they already lost a game. We did good and we're not tilted about this game as we didn't expect it. So I think if we get a good start, we can win against them.

SK have another test up ahead as they have Titan in their crosshairs in tomorrow's do-or-die match scheduled for 13:00 .