scara: "Hope to stick together"

The Belgian and the four Frenchmen finished their group in the first place by winning against Luminosity and k1ck oldschool. They were also successful in eliminating iGame.com and will face Epsilon in the quarter finals. Before the clash we talked to Victor "⁠Roombang⁠" Henkinet about their run:

When and how did this lineup get created?

It was formed around three weeks ago. At the beginning it was a completely different roster and player after player left the team. I was actually playing with the Belgian dd team at the WESG EU&CIS Regional Finals and I joined Platinium after they qualified for ESWC.

You won your first group stage game against Luminosity, a team that has more experience. How were you able to win against them?

Since we know who was in our group early on, we worked on every possible matchup, both for best-of-ones and best-of-threes. We decided what our strongest maps were and what we could play against the Brazilians.

In the winners' match, you won against k1ck oldschool. What would you like to say about that game?

Same thing, really. We watched a lot of demos and knew they were playing Cache, Mirage, and Dust2 and we knew we were probably going to play Cache. We anti-stratted them a lot, watching out for what they would do. For example, when we knew there were four guys in middle, we could correctly guess where the fifth guy was and we would exploit the empty areas to push and cover them from every angle. We anti-stratted them but they couldn't do the same because we're a new team so we had an advantage.

Today you won against iGame.com in a best-of-three match to advance to the quarter-finals. How did you feel after that win?

It felt really great, especially in the first map as I think we won 16-3. Starting like that gives a lot of confidence when you're a young team. I think we've been in the lead in the whole tournament except on the second map against iGame.com where we trailed 3-7. Our first win gave us a lot of confidence and we managed to come back in the second map because of that. Now that we know we'll play our next game on the stage, we're even more pumped.

What about that next match. You'll play in front of your home crowd who'll be cheering for you. How do you feel about the match against the Swedes? Are you excited?

We are very excited and we just learned about twenty minutes ago. But it's going to be against Epsilon who I think is a next level squad. It's going to be much harder than the opponents we have faced so far. There's a lot of people here so I think the French crowd might help us but Epsilon are definitely the huge favorites. We just hope we'll show our best face.

What about the future? Are you guys going to play any qualifiers?

We plan to play more qualifiers. We are on ESEA Main and we're trying to qualify for ESEA Premier. We also play in some small French leagues. Before the event we said this lineup was only for ESWC but since it's going so well, we hope to stick together to play as much qualifiers as possible.

Any last words?

Thanks to our organization Platinium and sponsors for sending us to this event. I also want to thank to my teammates for their amazing play and thank you for the interview.

Roombang's team will play against Epsilon at 16:00 in order to advance to the semi-finals.

BenjaCS is a staff writer at HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.