Happy: "If we had lost Cobble, the responsibility would've been on me"

A strong 11-4 first half from Envy on Cobblestone was a result of them being in control of the economy throughout their Terrorist side, with the clutches, which almost all went the Frenchmen's way, helping in that.

Happy was on point on Cobblestone, but the game got drawn out

Things got complicated for Envy after the switch, as Windigo mounted a comeback, but Vincent "⁠Happy⁠" Schopenhauer's side was able to close it out in overtime, with the team's in-game leader dropping 40 kills in the process.

I'll start with the feelings coming into the event, considering the results of the last Minor that you came in as the favorites, one of the favorites at least. Coming here, what was the feeling inside of the team and how did you approach it?

We actually didn't talk too much about the event, because the last time we did, it went pretty bad. I've decided to treat it like any other tournament, basically. And yeah, personally, of course, I am thinking a lot about this event because we failed the last one, when we had a good chance.

Funilly enough, I don't think that we are the clear favorites for the event because, first of all, we struggle at LAN tournaments for at least six months and I think we also struggle against lower-tier opponents. It's no disrespect, but I think we have really tough times playing against tier 2 teams. Of course, we can fail events on LAN against tier 1, that we did, but we always get at least one match which is pretty close, for example, SK at New York was 16-12 and things like that. But against unknown players, per se, we have trouble finding consistency beating them.

Tell me then about the preparation for this event, did you scout any of the teams? Out of the other group, it's OpTic and Space Soldiers who are probably the favorites to go far, but in your group you have three teams you need to beat to get out. How did you shape your preparation, what did you aim at?

We knew that we were going to play ex-Outlaws (Windigo), we've already played them in a qualifier and we lost to them, in the first match, on the same map.

So yeah, we prepared, but it didn't take that much time, because actually, they did pretty much the same thing they did the last time, it was really surprising stuff. For example, they would go silently pushing middle on the T side, try to surprise people. And even though we were prepared, it still worked, and as I told you, we really struggle finding consistency, even if we know what the opponents might do. And yeah, we just prepared for the event, not too much specifically. I did, on the side, for myself and a little bit for the team, but overall, we decided to treat the event like any other one.

The first half, you personally won three or four clutches, your team won about five, you had a great, 11-4 scoreline, but how happy were you with how it played out, considering it all came down to those clutches?

Of course, I'm happy to win clutches, but as a leader, when I got out of the match and when we won, I told myself "what the fuck", we had to win so many clutches and tough situations when they played good, but it wasn't crazy, insane strategies or something like that.

You can say that our T side is really good even though we won a crazy amount of clutches, but we really have trouble finding the consistency on the CT side. We get surprised with really boring strategies and stuff. As a leader, it was a bit worrying that we really had trouble closing the game, needing to have good plays individually. As a player, that can happen, when coldzera wins crazy clutches, no one says anything.

Then tell me about the CT side. As you said, you knew what to expect but still had troubles dealing with it. Why do you think that was, what was the issue in stopping the slow-mid that Windigo did?

I don't know, we know what they are going to do, and then on the CT side it's up to the players to actually position themselves. I give them that freedom, unless it goes bad and I have to say something, or when we do something special. Yeah, on the T side we won eco rounds and half-buys and stuff, we couldn't do that on CT because they played together. They had the game plan, they followed it and they trusted it. It worked for them and we were not able to counter that.

So yeah, it was just hard, Cobblestone on the CT side can be really hard, even though we play the map and we are super confident on that one. When everything goes bad for you on the CT side of Cobble it's just really tough.

You decided to go for Cobble and maybe not some other map in the veto. It didn't end up costing you in the end but it could've, as we saw. Do you feel that there was maybe another route you could've taken this time?

If we had lost Cobble, the responsibility would've been on me, because we were team A which decides the last map. It was between Inferno and Cobble and I knew Inferno was their best map. I knew that they would feel confident and maybe a little bit cocky because they beat us online, so I decided to play Cobble.

I knew it was going to be Cobble like a week before, because it always goes like that with that kind of a team. I knew that we could do it and I think that sometimes it's important to show that you learned from your mistakes, that you are actually a team that can evolve. Even though the result might be really shaky, as a leader, I'm still very happy that we could beat opponents that beat us before.