daps: "We got careless"

Team Canada managed to go undefeated in the first day of TWC 2016, even though they were forced to use Kyle "⁠OCEAN⁠" O'Brien instead of David "⁠DAVEY⁠" Stafford.

On the second day, the Canadians were shocked by France who struggled against Tunisia before that, and then narrowly lost to one of the favorites - team Denmark.

Before they started their match versus Turkey, we caught up with Damian "⁠daps⁠" Steele to learn his thoughts about how things went so far.

Let’s talk about Team Canada, the five players that are here – why are they here, how did you put the team together?

The five players we have is: DAVEY, android, me, SEMPHIS, twistzz and OCEAN who is our coach/manager/backup type thing. We decided to have it so people that came here the last year had the option to come again. So DAVEY, SEMPHIS and I are returning members, fns and NAF did not want to come, and I asked some other people like shroud who couldn’t come either and this is the lineup that I could get. I think it’s the best roster that I could get here.

So far you have four wins and two losses - to Denmark and France, can you tell me what you think about the results in the groups so far?

The groups went well I guess you could say, we still have to play Turkey. The two matches we lost we kinda got careless, especially versus France. I mean, we are a pug so we just started running around and that ended up biting us in the ass - we ended up losing since we had no money and it was CT side Cobble.

Against Denmark, we still didn’t have DAVEY so we used OCEAN… considering we weren’t even using the five we got it’s been pretty good.

Did you have any preparation for the tournament?

Nope, no boot camp like Turkey did or anything like that, we didn’t play at all before coming here. Because it’s kinda hard with everyone having their own teams.

What was the deal with DAVEY being late to the tournament? He didn’t come on the same day with you..?

DAVEY had to play some matches for ESL Pro League for his actual team so he came a bit later, and then one of his flights got canceled so he ended up coming today in the afternoon.

You still don’t know who you’re going to play in the playoffs, but who do you want to avoid in the bracket play, at least in the first round?

I think we want to avoid Turkey and Denmark, because I think they are the most prepared I would say. We would prefer to play either Argentina, Singapore or Tunisia, but we don’t really care. If we’re gonna win the tournament we need to beat everyone, or at least Turkey or Denmark anyways.

Any thought on the graffiti update that came in today with the latest update?

I haven’t played it yet as we are using the old version of the Counter-Strike here still. About the sprays – I expected it, I was surprised they haven’t done it before. I’ve seen some threads where people could confuse it for a person, so competitively I would probably turn them off.

Regarding you personally, any news about teams or future plans?

There have been options and opportunities but I’m not jumping into anything right away. The only thing that I’m sure is that I’m playing the WESG LAN in Brazil that we qualified for, if we get visas in time. That’s the only thing that’s 100% so far.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.