Rickeh: "Our coach made the difference, but we still can perform at the same level"

CLG made their debut in Valencia with a victory over NRG on Overpass after an impressive Terrorist side in which they took 11 rounds. 

Rickeh says he is always confident against any team

After the match, we caught up with Ricardo "⁠Rickeh⁠" Mulholland to discuss the performance against NRG, their map pool and more.

You just beat NRG and had a good T-side but you seemed to have a little trouble closing out the game. What can you say about it?

While trying to close out the game, we lost the CT pistol and the first gun round, so that put them back straight to 11-8. I think from there we just – I don't think we took a pause – discussed how we would go into the next gun round and, from there on, we managed to solidify our defence.

You came into the game confident or…

Yes, against NRG we're always confident. Personally, I'm always confident versus any team, but they were the underdog coming into that match, so we expected to win in the end.

Overpass was the map you played. How are you feeling about your map pool?

Our map pool is a little bit weird at the moment. We actually swapped Inferno for Nuke, but, at the moment we're struggling to pick which one is actually our better map because unfortunately we are not that good on either of the maps. We're confident on any other map, so we need to decide which one we have to play.

Your group also has NiP and Red Reserve. Which team would you rather face?

I would rather play Red Reserve, but I think there's probably a 95% chance we're facing NiP.

Can you talk a little bit about your preparation for Valencia?

Our preparation was probably about putting in as much work as we had coming into the Minor qualifier since we didn't qualify for a couple of bigger events. This is our last event before going into the player break, so we have been playing as hard as possible.

Since you joined the team, you have been improving, but then you failed to qualify for DreamHack Atlanta. Did that affect you?

Yes, when we lost in the Atlanta qualifier, we were pretty shaken up over it, we didn't expect to lose. At the same time, we understood that it was an online best-of-three match that we should've won, but I think it was bound to happen sooner or later, losing a game like that, so for us it was more about recovering and keeping a strong mentality moving forward.

ImAPet just left the team. What did you  do when he left? Have you started looking for another coach?

We're currently in the process of looking for another coach, but FNS has taken up the majority of the coaching role. He's just putting in a little bit more work, watching a few more demos and just making sure we're prepared. Our coach definitely made the difference, but at the same time I think we still can perform at the same level without one.