Xizt: "We've been playing really weird in tight situations"

Ninjas in Pyjamas exited their second tournament in a row in the group stage, as they picked up only two tight wins across five matches in the round robin at ESL Pro League, conceding maps to NRG, Misfits, and SK.

NiP are planning to get the most out of their time, of which there will be plenty

We got a hold of the team's in-game leader, Richard "⁠Xizt⁠" Landström, on the quarter-finals day in Odense and talked to him about their results, playing against former teammate Adam "⁠friberg⁠" Friberg, and plans for the future, which thus far remains unclear for Ninjas in Pyjamas :

A poor result for you, losing three Overpasses towards the end of the group stage, can you elaborate on what went wrong?

At this tournament, including at BLAST, we've been playing really weird in situations, we often get an advantage early on in the rounds more often than not.

I don't know if we're nervous or something like that, but yeah, in these tight situations we play really, really weird, and that's something we've been working on, but we haven't had that much time as well. Directly from Oakland we went to BLAST and then we had one week home, so we have a lot of stuff to work on.

Does that partially come down to the new guys not being as experienced?

It's both the new guys and us, the older guys, all of us we play weird as a team rather than individually. We just have a lot of things to work on, not only in-game but outside of the game, how we practice, how we approach the game, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

What was it like playing against friberg for the first time, was there an additional level of excitement to it?

Personally, I think it was really fun playing against him. It's been going well for them this tournament and that's also something that makes me happy and I think the rest of the guys as well.

We knew what to expect when we played friberg, we knew he was going to scream loudly when they won a round or something like that, so it was just fun. I think they had a lot of fun as well, friberg and allu. I was looking forward to the game.

You don't have anything coming up for quite a long time, tell me about your plans for the rest of the year and for next year.

Yeah, we don't have a tournament scheduled yet, I think. So what we're going to do is go home and start planning, basically, we don't know exactly what it looks like yet, so we're just going to go back home and start planning for next year.

Do you see it as a good thing that you'll have a lot of time after a fairly long streak of tournaments?

Yeah, it's always good to have more time to practice. Obviously it's sad that we didn't qualify for certain tournaments like the Major qualifier and ECS finals, but it is what it is and we're going to make the most of it. We're going to use most of the time to practice and get these extra hours that other teams can't. We're not going to slack off, we're going to keep practicing and work hard.