GuardiaN: "I think mousesports struggle with coming back into the game when they're out of timeouts"

FaZe are now through to the semi-finals, having beaten MOUZ 2-0 in the first quarter-final at the Agganis Arena in Boston after coming back from a 13-15 deficit on Nuke, winning two unlikely situations to take it to overtime and clinch map one. After that, Cache was a comfortable affair, as FaZe secured the series after a 16-9 scoreline.

GuardiaN discussed the mousesports quarter-final

After the match, we interviewed Ladislav "⁠GuardiaN⁠" Kovács to see how they came back in the tough Nuke and how they view Cache and Train (which would have been the deciding map of the series) in their map pool:

You played Cache and Train twice throughout groups and the qualifier and clearly were ready to play them today as well, how much time did you put into those maps and trying to expand your map pool with these two maps?

We were talking about the map pool a lot, beause we lost to Vega on Inferno and Inferno used to be our best map, so if you talk about a map pool, we did our best to fix it and to be ready on as many maps as we can. I think we're very good or close to perfect on three maps and then we have like Inferno and Nuke that we can play.

Nuke is a very hard map and we struggle with communication on the CT side, so that's why I think the teams have a chance to beat us on this map. I mean, our map pool is very good, I would say.

You seemed to struggle on Nuke versus mousesports on both sides, it looked quite one-sided in favor of mousesports in terms of actual gunrounds, was that down to communication like you said?

I wouldn't say it was a communication issue today, there was a round where we went to A site and we got completely destroyed. After that round, I called that we shouldn't go A, because they have a fast rotation, any time we went A, there were at least three or four guys on the A site, so we made that mistake that we didn't change the tactics earlier than the last like two-three rounds.

Every time we went lower we won the round, so we changed it up, we knew what we had to do and it worked out. We had to fake the upper site a little bit and there would be like three guys, so we can go to B almost for free. It was everything we did, we just discussed it in the timeout and it worked out.

The last rounds on Nuke ended up in 2v4 situations and you ended up taking those to push the match to overtime, how much of an impact do you think that had on mousesports going into the overtime?

mousesports is obviously a very good team, but when the team is out of timeouts, I think they struggle with coming back into the game. I think their team is based on good timeouts, if you don't have a timeout, I would say even then you have like a 70-80% chance to close out the game even if you're winning 15-13, so... I think that was the key point that they didn't have any more timeouts, so they couldn't calm down, and I think we just used our experience and skill to beat them. They were better on Nuke, obviously, but I think we used everything else to beat them.

On Cache there was a point where karrigan started calling a lot more fast-paced strats and it backfired, as opposed to the slow pace that had been working before, did he just want to change things up or what was the thinking there?

I think it was 7-4 when we won one round and we knew that the past two rounds they survived only in two when they won the round. So we knew they had no money and then we won the round, it was 8-4, and they would either forcebuy with one AWP, probably, because oskar was saving a lot of rounds, so we knew he might have the AWP, so that's why maybe we made Finn miscall some rounds, or I don't know.

Maybe we shouldn't have called that they have an eco or that they can have an eco, so probably if we didn't say that they have no money, we wouldn't have rushed. It's hard to say. But yeah, I think that had some influence on karrigan's calling at that point of the game. Maybe he felt like we needed to change the pace of the game and just start rushing, but it didn't work out, so we went back to the slow pace and it worked.