flamie: "It's a tournament in our home country, we needed to win and pass the group stage"

Natus Vincere played five matches in the group stage of StarSeries i-League Season 4, starting off strong with two wins. However, they got to the edge of elimination after losses to FaZe and SK and had to face HEROIC for a chance to play in front of the live audience in Kiev. Natus Vincere managed to take the win despite a debacle on Mirage, which they lost without taking a single round as Terrorists.

flamie thinks that they relaxed too much in the second half of Mirage

In our post-match interview, we asked Egor "⁠flamie⁠" Vasilyev about the knife situation against SK, the struggles on Mirage and Denis "⁠electroNic⁠" Sharipov's role in the team.

I'll start with the match you played yesterday, against SK. Obviously, a hard matchup but the talking point was the knife and losing Cobblestone. Can you tell me what was the atmosphere in the team like then?

During the game, when we decided to knife, it was a stupid mistake by us, but we didn't feel like we were going to lose the game after that round. We thought that they didn't play as good as we expected as CT, but they just felt the power after that round and they played their best game after it. So we didn't win it, we expected to lose Cobblestone but we didn't expect to play so bad on Inferno because it is our best map right now, I think. So I don't know, we just played a bad game and we lost, that's it.

You got the draw against Heroic today, what was the initial thinking when you got that matchup?

Of course, it's an easier match than Cloud9 or mousesports but they are a really nice team. As you can see, they always play well against top teams and we knew that it was going to be a hard match for us, but we managed to win and I'm happy that we did it.

I have to ask about the Mirage that you played, after an 11-4 first half you get zero T rounds, what was the issue there?

I think in the beginning we maybe thought that we already won, or something like that. We should never think like this and we should play rounds 100% [focused]. So we had some close rounds but we didn't take them and we messed up our economy, messed up our rounds... We didn't start to tilt a lot but we didn't feel the game at all. They took Mirage but we discussed after that it should not happen again, that we should win Overpass. It's a tournament in our [team's] home country, we need to win and pass the group stage.

The start of Overpass was a lot of back and forth, eco rounds and pistol wins. What was going on in your minds during that period?

When we play the force rounds we know that they are maybe one of the most important rounds in the game, so we need to focus a lot on it. We managed to take these force rounds and crush their economy as well, we played good on these rounds and, after that, it was just our normal game and we won.

When you won the second half anti-eco, kane started jumping and yelling, that's not what we usually see from him. What was going on there?

Yeah, as I said it is our home tournament so we really wanted to make it to the playoffs, and when Heroic win rounds like this they usually start yelling. We usually don't do this but we needed to break their morale. So kane started to help us with this and he started shouting as well, and it worked.

At the beginning of the tournament, Zeus mentioned that he was sick. Is that still active and is it something that bothered him in this match?

In the beginning of the tournament, he had a stomach problem so he couldn't focus that much on the game, but we didn't play that bad. And right now, before the game, two of our players started to feel headaches. And it's hard to focus when you are in pain. Right now it's better, no stomach problem, but there was a headache problem. I hope it will be fixed before the playoffs.

When electronic was playing in FlipSid3, he was by far the best player of that team, putting up great numbers all the time. Now he seems to be more of a middle of the pack player, a lot of people are kind of disappointed with him in Na`Vi, wondering why he can't be on his FlipSid3 level. What is your take on that?

I think, first of all, we have s1mple on our team, he always gets 30 frags so it's kind of hard to do the same when one player on your team has such a good rating and good stats. But for electronic, I think that he is more of a support player right now, not a star player. He is usually throwing nades. So for example, Xyp9x from Astralis, he also doesn't have crazy stats because he is a support player, and that is how it works right now.