oskar: "ropz's time will come"

With only one loss in Group B after an overtime with North, MOUZ placed second and met tournament favorites SK in the quarter-finals, which saw the Brazilians winning two maps in a row in comfortable fashion.

oskar shed some light on mousesports' leadership in-game

Yesterday we grabbed Tomáš "⁠oskar⁠" Šťastný for an interview about his team's showing at the tournament, Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool's improvement from DreamHack Open Tours, and their goals for the nearest future.

Let's start with how you practiced after France, what did you work on the most throughout the last one or two weeks?

After France, we took two days off and then played every day including weekends. We practiced mostly T sides and we prepared for some opponents, because we already knew the groups and who we were going to play against. So, we prepared our T side, what setups we will have, but we didn't focus on the CT sides, we said we were going to practice CT sides here, look at some demos and see what we're going to do, but it didn't work out at all and we played how we did. But the preparation was exhausting, we played at least eight hours every day.

So, getting to the group, how did you see your chances of advancing?

When we saw the groups, we knew we were going to fight for first place, that it wouldn't be as hard as Group A. So, we counted on first place, but about five days before the event we lost our form, we lost to almost everyone in practice and that didn't help our confidence. But when we started here, after we played the first match against North, we believed in our ability to advance from the groups.

Practically each of your results ended in at least fairly close manner, with the matches with North and Na`Vi going to overtimes, what were the hardships with closing out some of those matches? How did you then feel about the results, knowing you were going to play SK in quarter-finals?

Everybody knew that we always started as Terrorists, where we got the most rounds, 12 against Na`Vi, eight against North on Nuke, which is really hard, everyone we played we won the T side, but we couldn't close out the match, so we couldn't really win with a one-sided result.

After the group, we knew it was going to be hard against SK, because on the day we arrived here we practiced them on two maps and they destroyed us, but we wanted to give it our all. We again won one of the T sides, the other was close, but we weren't even on the server as CT.

Talking about the T sides, you even chose to start as T on Mirage against SK, where it looked like you could've very well had another good half, but you lost a few advantageous situations…

It was tilting, it was hard to come back from that, because we talk about these mistakes after just about every match, we've been dealing with this after every match we have played since Tours. In every match, there are situations like this from which we need to learn and avoid making the same mistakes in the future. But since Tours to now it went the same way and we were rarely able to avoid them.

ropz now finished his second tournament with you, his first big event, how would you rate his progress, be it as a team player or individually, his confidence…?

He definitely started believing in himself more, he played better than at Tours, which was his first tournament, but here he played well. He had his moments, more good than bad, a few of them were bad but we can't blame him for it, he's still young and he's learning. But he played well, his time will come and he will play as he does at home or a couple of months ago when he was unstoppable.

I'm definitely not disappointed, I like to play alongside him, he's calm, doesn't panic - even if that defuse situation on Inferno doesn't testify to it – but otherwise he's calm and does what he should, and he's learning.

Before this tournament, lmbt was mostly calling for the team from what I know, but you had to deal with it in another way for tournaments like this where the “new” coaching rules are in place. How does leadership now work in mousesports, who has the most say in decisions?

Chris calls tactics that we practiced, either we go default and then go into something that we trained, or I help him and tell him that I'll go somewhere with the AWP and do something, he adjusts the tactic and says that they'll either go on my contact or somewhere else entirely to mix it up.

I feel like I help him very often, Chris is sometimes unsure about what to do, so I try to help him, but it's not just me, the others do as well, denis sometimes says something when he has a good idea, loWel as well… So it's everyone, even though mostly it's Chris and me talking about what we will do and where we end up.

What will be the team's goals for the nearest future, where you have DreamHack Summer, the PGL Major offline qualifier, and ESL One Cologne before the Major, potentially?

We'll now finish our mini bootcamp in Dallas, then we'll go back home and get a couple of days off again. We didn't really talk about specifics yet, but we won't underestimate anything, we won't take too much time off, we'll work hard and play a little bit more relaxed at DreamHack Summer, more relaxed CT side, not focusing on antistrats.

Then we have several more even more important tournaments like you said, so we'll take DreamHack a little bit more relaxed, but we'll continously work on our play there as well.