FalleN: "[Liquid] are in the best form I've ever seen them playing"

Two semi-final exits to Liquid, one in New York and one in Mykonos, together with a 5-8th placing after a defeat to G2 in Malmö are SK's results since the player break. Despite placing high enough to hold onto the world's #1 ranking, the Brazilians have fallen off after a great first half of the year.

SK are far from happy with their recent placings

To hear more about how the SK squad is feeling, we talked with Gabriel "⁠FalleN⁠" Toledo on the grand final day of ESL One New York.

Looking back at Greece and here, two semi-final exits, both to Liquid. Tell me about that, tell me what Liquid maybe figured out, why do you think you are having so much trouble against them right now?

I think we are playing a great Team Liquid right now, they are in the best form I've ever seen Liquid playing. I think it's just a combination of us playing a little bit below our expectations and them having the best moments of their lives. So props to them, I won't take away anything from them. I think they were pretty convincing in the first series and the second one could've gone our way, it was a question of one or two rounds in both maps. So props to them, I feel like they played a good match.

Do you feel like you have underperformed individually, especially compared to the couple of tournaments you won in the row in the summer period? Do you feel like some of the players have dropped off individually?

I don't like to finger-point anyone and say that someone is having a bad tournament or not. For example, if you look at statistics and try to find an answer from that you are going to see that on this tournament that we lost, felps didn't have the same performance that he had in the first ones, but if you look at Mykonos, he had one of his best performances with us, and we lost the same way. You can't really look at the statistics and try to find an answer. You need to go way beyond that to really understand what is happening.

There is a lot of things failing up, I think I'm failing in some aspects. I think strat wise and sometimes even frag wise we are doing some silly mistakes, some stupid decisions during the matches, and that is costing us games. What I feel like is happening is, we have two or three players doing pretty well in a tournament, the other guys are not stepping up. Then we go to another tournament, and those guys are stepping up and the other three are not on the same level anymore.

So it's just a combination of things that are happening during our tournaments. As long as we get everyone rolling I'm sure we are going to do a little bit better.

Previously, you said you want to get five trophies out of eight tournaments—now that is five out of six, right? The window is kind of closing, do you think it's still possible, do you feel like you can still pull it off?

Until we have five tournaments it's still possible. Yeah, it's a bit scary. [laughs] Maybe we have to set our expectations a little bit lower.

But I mean, that is just a joke, we are here to do our jobs and I think we are doing it pretty great. In spite of losing, we ended up with another top four. And let's be honest, we don't like staying in the semi-finals. We want to play in the finals, and if we were losing there, if we were second all the time, we would be very sad as well.

It's all about how we see ourselves. Right now, we are SK, we are one of the best teams in the world, we want to win every tournament. Leaving as top four is bad for us. I understand it's a good result and it is good for a lot of teams, a lot of teams would dream to be at the spot we are right now, but not us. We want to win the tournaments so we have to fix what's happening.