nahtE: "Using timeouts efficiently"

After a disappointing first day, where they lost a narrow match to Vega Squadron, CLG managed an unlikely victory over Renegades with a lockdown CT side.

To hear about both of their matches, we talked to CLG's youngster Ethan "⁠Ethan⁠" Arnold.

What did you do in between Northern Arena and now, seeing that was kind of a disappointing event for you? What was the plan in the meantime, how did you prepare, what was your focus on?

Right after Montreal we all went home for one or two weeks. After that we came back to our House in California and just hit it hard with practice until now. We mostly focused on just getting a lot of quantity in, as many scrims as we could every day, trying to keep it pretty calm and consistent so we were ready when we got here.

The match against Vega Squadron was the only one you knew in advance so that was the only thing you could prepare for - but how much could you actually prepare seeing that they didn't play anything except the Minor? What was your mindset going into that match?

The only demos we could find really were a month old so we tried to go off of that but there really wasn't that much we could look for. We just focused on adapting in game. We were pretty confident, but we also knew they had a gaming house for like a month and that they were bootcamping so we respected that. They obviously had enough time to practice but we definitely thought we should've won.

It was a tight match on Mirage but they prevailed in the end, what do you think edged it out for them?

They had one guy that was hitting a lot of shots, I think a lot us were pretty shaky at the end, kind of tilted. We weren't that prepared, we didn't know what to do and it all came to hitting shots in the end and they did it better.

In the match against Renegades it started pretty rough for you on the T side but you managed to get the last couple of rounds. Was there any special adaptation you did in the last rounds of the T half?

We talked last night about using timeouts more efficiently, I think that just in our T half we used all of our time outs, tried to spread it out pretty evenly. We just kept level headed, got talking in the end and that helped.

Switching to CT you practically started 15-5 down, what was going on in the team in those rounds, some of them were pretty close?

I don't know honestly, everyone was hitting pretty good shots, we kept calm, doing what we always do and it worked. Everyone was communicating really well also.

Renegades seem to be struggling on their T side on Dust2 against NiP yesterday, is there something you noticed from that or something you tried to do that was similar?

We actually talked about it last night, we just wanted to go in dry, focus on our own game, we didn't really watch their demo at all. We played our game and did what we had to do.

Moving on, how are you feeling now, what are your expectations from the rest of the tournament?

Relieved again, we were down 0-1 after a game we didn't really think we were going to lose and now we won against a really good team.

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