USTILO: Mentality our biggest issue

Renegades, one of the teams invited to IEM Sydney, didn't have the greatest of starts to the event on their home soil. After a lackluster performance against FaZe, Noah "⁠Nifty⁠" Francis's new team was smashed by the up-and-coming Australian side Chiefs. Things finally went better for Renegades today, when they eliminated the Chinese side ViCi.

To hear about their matches so far, their roster changes and their practice results, we talked to Karlo "⁠USTILO⁠" Pivac.

Let's start with the phase when Rickeh left the team, what were you looking to do with the roster, what were the plans and how did that develop?

When Rickeh departed Renegades we were obviously looking for an AWPer to replace him, but then things happened with yam and he had to go back to Australia so we were in a really tough position as we needed to get an AWPer and an in-game leader, which is essentially impossible to find in these days, except if you are buying someone out for a huge contract.

So we saw Nifty, we saw what he was doing on Selfless and we liked it. He was in a lower tier team and he was playing good against high tier opposition so he was an obvious choice. And NEXA, honestly we didn't know too much about him until Kassad mentioned him, what he'd done and we watched a few demos of him, against VP. He was playing FPL a lot and he was doing allright. So we thought, we are going to take the gamble on him, and he wanted to in-game lead so that was a plus. That's how we got those two players.

You had the European bootcamp, how did that go, both in terms of you internally clicking as the team and the practice against others?

The bootcamp was really good, we were feeling really good in practice, we were beating teams… I won't mention names but we were doing really good, being crisp, feeling great.

Talking about that, I think a few teams and players mentioned that you are a team that does really good in practice, in the NA region and maybe even in Europe as well, but in the official matches and on the LAN's you can't really reproduce it. Is that something you talk about, you are aware of?

We don't really talk about it, I don't know, I think we are a really, really momentum based team. If we get in a good mood and start getting rounds I feel like we are one of those teams that are basically unstoppable. But if things don't go our way, we lose 1v1's, lose stupid rounds, make stupid mistakes, people get their heads down and we need to work on that. We need to be strong all the time and not put our heads down. I feel our biggest issue is our mentality at times.

Coming here, what was the preparation like, what were you aiming for, what were the goals?

We only had a week with NEXA to practice, so there wasn't much time to go over stuff, but we've done as much as we could with him. Coming into it, we knew we were playing FaZe and we got a bit caught off guard by their veto. We though that we were going to be playing Train or Cache most likely and they vetoed Cache straight off, first thing. So we ended up playing Mirage, we prepared for it but it wasn't what we were expecting at all. In that game we were getting mid picks all the time, we were getting the first kills, but we would just collapse after that, we just weren't playing as a team. 

After the match, after the day, did you go through the VoD, did you see what you needed to do differently?

Yeah, we just knew that once we got the first kill in the round we were panicking a bit, we weren't just sitting still and talking, communicating, we were just doing our own things. So we said, we need to relax, group up and play basic CS that we weren't doing yesterday.

Next off was the match against Chiefs, that was a match you were 14-0 down at one point, it was a crushing 16-5 defeat to the Australian side. Can you walk me through that match?

Honestly I don't know what happened that game. Nothing against Chiefs, they are good players, but that is probably the worst loss ever for me personally, and I'm sure for the other guys as well. Again, we didn't get off to a good start, all of our got our heads down, one thing leads to another... I don't know what to say, it was really bad. Probably one of the lowest points.

In an interview yesterday, tucks said that they felt pretty confident going against you and that they maybe deserve more opportunities in general. What are your thoughts on that situation and them being so motivated, so confident?

They've got a whole bunch of young, really keen players that can just smash it out. I've been watching as much as I can of the Australian CS while I'm in America and they seem to be basically dominating the scene right now. Honestly, I think they could do big things and eventually move to the US, for tucks is sort of hard because he has a VAC but for the others, they are all really good players and they could do something internationally or move to NA. They are young, sharp players.

After that first day you were drawn against ViCi. At the beginning it seemed a bit shaky, but the two clutches seemed to be pretty big for you?

We were coming into it knowing we were going to be playing Cobble, we weren't going to veto Cobble, they weren't going to veto Cobble so we knew we were going to be playing Cobble. Our coach Kassad watched a few demos so we knew what they were going to do. Basically we just played our own game and once we got on that roll we are hard to stop, as I said before.

What are the thoughts in the team now, moving forward, after this score-wise big win?

I think it was really big, we needed a big win to get our confidence back, it was really bad after yesterday. I don't know who we will be playing next, but if we get our win, anything can happen. If we are 2-2 anything can happen and we can easily make the final four.

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