NBK: Had a really tough discussion

Tricked shocked G2 in the initial match of Group B, defeating athe Frenchmen 16-7 on Inferno before Richard "⁠shox⁠" Papillon and company sent Envy packing and went on to take revenge on the Danes in the following best-of-three decider.

In our next interview from Tours, Nathan "⁠NBK-⁠" Schmitt talks about his team's poor start, fixing their issues for day two, and naturally the upcoming semi-final against MOUZ:

Firstly, let's go back to Austin and your semi-final finish there after a close match with Gambit despite being favored to win the whole thing. What do you think were your issues in the US?

We were shaky from the first game till the end. I think we were "Counter-Strikely" supposed to win against Gambit, we were up 14-10 on the last map with good economy and they had $2,000 and managed to win the round and went on to beat us in the third map.

Yeah, overall we were really shaky and our comms weren't on point, individually nobody was really stepping up and playing well to make up for what we were doing wrong. It's a mix of a lot of things and yeah, I think we played decent games because we were being pushed by American teams that we're not very used to playing against. And then Gambit was a very very tight game.

You kind of replicated your start at Austin here in Tours, losing to Tricked in the first round, what went wrong on the first day, was it simply a slow start?

No, I just think Tricked destroyed us on Inferno. There was no game here, they just had good tactics, good timings, they were headshotting much harder than us. Every team is dangerous at that point in time in Counter-Strike. Our Inferno was not the best, we've had a lot of troubles recently, we couldn't really pracc much on it. So it's not about the first game, it was just about playing well, in a simple way of putting it. We couldn't do it against Tricked and again, they played a very good game and there was much to learn from that match.

What was there to learn then, since on the second day you seemed to overcome those issues and got back on track with a very straight-forward match against EnVyUs and similarly so in the Tricked one… What was it that you talked about and fixed for today?

Yeah, definitely, after the first game we had here, we could feel that something was completely off. And so I decided to gather the whole team and have a really tough discussion and really point out the fact that players weren't assuming their roles and weren't doing the same thing they were doing online or in practice, embracing their role of star players or support players, controlling what's happening in the round. So really pointing that out very precisely and hoping for a reaction from those players.

And it helped everyone to really be in their role again and know what they have to do and what their objectives are. Now you can see that today, it was kind of a do-or-die thing to do, either nobody picks anything up from it and we get destroyed or things actually change, the mindset changes, and we're back into it. It worked for the best and it's good that we have a team that can talk together and not take criticism on a personal level but just understanding that everybody can be better, and then we can come back from tough situations.

Is that hard to do, considering the history of French teams and their personal issues, is it hard to overcome?

I think it depends on the periods, at the moment we're very good together, we're a good group and we really like playing with each other. I often have that role of being very critical, looking at the bigger picture and then pointing things out, how things go wrong and why we're bad on a Counter-Strike level.

And so it's something people know me for in the French scene and I think they know it's kind of necessary in order to become better and to overcome these issues. It's all up to the players to realize that I do that not for the pleasure of shitting on people (laughs) or being mean to them, but just in order to make a step forward and be critical about ourselves. It depends on the players, everybody reacted really well and now we know what we are capable of and everyone is much more into their role as I said before.

Moving on to the semi-finals and your match with mousesports, what do you think that match-up will be like?

They've been showing a lot of good things online and now on LAN as well, the two games they played were very clean from what I saw. There's always that trick that you have a flawless group stage and then you have a one day break, which changes things, because teams can play in between to fix their mistakes.

Although they're gonna have the advantage of knowing how we play, by looking at the demos, we're gonna have the advantage of being on a roll, having won two best-of-three's in a row. But yeah, they're a strong team right now, they have a lot of individual power and hopefully we will be able to match that. If we do, I think we have the tactical edge and the experience on LAN, plus the public that is behind us. All of that together gives us a small edge, but they are showing a lot of good things, so it's all up to us to break them and show them that we control the game and not them.

oskar had a good showing throughout groups, especially in the first match against Heroic, and you seemed to have issues dealing with Friis in your matches with Tricked, where he got a lof of picks with the AWP and multi-kills. Is that maybe going to be the focus in the semis?

It depends on the teams, a lot of teams are centered around the AWPer and working around it, so we consider Tricked as a team that is playing really well together and have tactics, teamplay, that kind of stuff. So we tried to counter their gameplay as a whole and not Friis specifically, but yeah, especially on Cobble we got picked several times because he was moving around the map really well.

Against mouz, it's more about countering individualities in their team, and not letting ropz go on and get confidence, and same thing with oskar. Those players that are in front of their team, they seem to work a lot on confidence. So if we can base our game in a way that shox and kenny counter them and then develop our game, I think that's where we're gonna have the edge.