Zero: Teams had to be heartbroken

The European mixture managed to close out the qualification in dramatic fashion after going from 2-0 to 2-2 by defeating Cloud9 on Overpass.

To get a better insight in the minds of the HellRaisers players during the last three matches, we had a chat with the young Slovakian Patrik "⁠Zero⁠" Žúdel.

Let's start with you being 2-0 up, you played a match against GODSENT on Train. They edged you out in the end, what went wrong for you in the match?

We were trying to play it like every game, like it's the first game and not get in our heads. We had a shaky start and after that it started snowballing. We were starting to get really stressed out with our decisions and basically we started doing things we didn't practice. That was our main problem.

Moving on, the next game was against OpTic, similar story in a way, a team you faced in the past qualifier and they beat you again. Same question more or less, how did the map go from your point of view?

It was the same map and we also lost the pistol. I think we kind of started thinking: "What if the curse is real?". What if we get close to the qualification and just bust. We started losing, we won some rounds, but from individual plays. We were very shaky, we weren't able to play together because everyone was trying to do their own thing and we weren't playing like a team. Again, we rushed our decision making that crumbled our structure.

Coming into the last match, how did that change? You started pretty bad, then got in the lead but when they started coming back was it in your head again?

I think it was in everyone's head. I think a lot of people know what happened on the past qualifiers, we were always really really close but we never made it. Some teams had to be heartbroken today, but I think that the teams that worked the hardest qualified in the end.

 

Towards the end of the match your team called a pause, we saw Johnta communicating something and after that you won the next round and you closed it out after that. Was there anything special that was called, what was the point of discussion?

It was just a normal call. He knows a lot about the game and is really experienced so he knows when to make the right call and that's what it was, nothing special.

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