Maniac: "I want to take my revenge"

After falling down at the hands of dignitas to match SK in the fight for survival, Titan will once again meet their initial opponents later today as they reasonably comfortably defeated Asger "⁠AcilioN⁠" Larsen's lineup on two maps.

Mathieu "⁠Maniac⁠" Quiquerez talked to us about facing SK Gaming's fresh lineup and about the re-match with dignitas for the second place in group A:

What are your feelings about your match with dignitas yesterday?

Even though we got crushed pretty clearly on Mirage, it actually came down to many individual mistakes, lack of lucidity. They won a one-on-three and two ecos, so in the end the CT side was really bad, but the rounds with actual weapons, those we won. So I guess on Mirage it came down to individual mistakes, lack of focus and stuff. But then on Overpass, they came 10 times on B and we just didn't get the kills. I think it was more of a skill problem on Overpass, because we knew what they were doing but still they won the duels against us. Overall, it was on one hand a very good performance from dignitas, they impressed me a lot, and on the other hand we played quite poorly. Lots of mistakes, lack of aim, lack of communication, it was both. They played good and we played bad.

Did you tilt in the middle of the match or was it just overall lack of communication etc.?

I think Mirage actually hit us very hard, because we knew that we had the map if we didn't do some dumb mistakes, so it was quite hard to deal with. But then on Overpass, we were still in the game, focused. When we switched to T, we just got destroyed. We expected them to be more agressive, but they actually stayed very defensive. We used tactics to catch them off-guard, but it didn't work, because they were actually defensive. Our plan A didn't really work, we lost so many rounds on CT that we didn't have the security, we had to win the first rounds or otherwise it was GG. We just lacked enough bonus rounds, it was a pretty logical loss I would say.

About today, the game with SK was quite decisive at least on the first map, did you prepare specifically for the match today or did you just do your basic stuff?

We were actually surprised by their veto and map pick, we didn't expect them to pick Overpass, so we didn't really prepare Overpass for them. But last night we had a big debrief after the loss to dignitas and the main objective for us was to actually stop doing silly mistakes and really play our game. So our main focus was on ourselves, like "guys, let's play real Counter-Strike, we know how to do it". Then, Overpass was quite messy at the beginning, it was 4-4 or something, but then we just won the rounds quite easily, I feel. I didn't think it was that hard. And then Cache - really rough beginning, they pushed B again, again and again, and we didn't find a solution for this. When we found a solution it was too late, we wanted to catch them on B, but they went A, so it was well played from them. It goes to show that we were out of timing, we had a solution but one round after the one where we should've done it. Their T side Cache was great I would say, but when we were T, we realized they had no solution. We were just basically playing standard tactics, controlling the whole map, picking some kills and then deciding what we would do. We just kept on winning the duels again and again, so we didn't really have to find a solution, it was quite easy, actually, I don't know why. I am pretty happy with the comeback we made, because we were pretty down after the CT side, but we could come back and that's very important.

Who would you like to face more?

Playing NiP is always special, because they're NiP, there's the prestige, of course. But I feel like I want to take my revenge against dignitas. They destroyed us pretty hard and that's the time for us to revenge, so I hope we're gonna play dignitas.

Titan's re-match with dignitas is scheduled for after the EnVyUs-mousesports winners' match, when both teams are set up on the stage.