tarik: "Still trying to transition FNS into the roster; these situations are bound to come up"

The second day of IEM Sydney 2018 brought some more exciting underdog performances, as ORDER pushed Cloud9 the distance and was on the brink of eliminating them from the tournament. As the score was 15-13 in favor of the Australians, William "⁠RUSH⁠" Wierzba clutched a 1v4 to keep his team in it, Cloud9 forced overtime and eventually won.

tarik feels that slip-ups are bound to happen until they adapt to FNS' style

In our post-match interview with Tarik "⁠tarik⁠" Celik, we discussed him stepping down from the IGL position and Cloud9 adapting to Pujan "⁠FNS⁠" Mehta's style.

After finishing Marseille, the first event with FNS, how did you assess that result and how did you feel coming here?

About Marseille, I won't say that I'm fully satisfied but at the same time it's not a complete disappointment since we did end up making top 8 and playing on stage. But I do think that we should've put up a better fight against Gambit, I think we should've won the series, to be honest, I think we kind of dropped the ball. But that's ok because it's our first event, we are still working on a lot of things, with FNS coming onto the team, fixing everything, but overall, it was not too bad.

Here you start off against Grayhound, you get the win, expected, and then you play against TyLoo. It's a pretty long day, jetlag is there... is it fair to say that that affected your game? Was that something that built up to the loss?

Yeah, well, I will say that playing super-late, I think that we got to the event at 6 and started the match at 10, after being up for 12 hours already, it sucks, but I'm not a fan of making excuses like this. I think that they played better, they played under the same circumstances as us, they had to play in the same conditions, that's how I see it. They won fair and square.

I don't think we played our best, but at the same time, I want to give them props because I think they played well. It was a tough loss, we still have to review that game and see exactly what happened, because regardless of anything, we should've beaten that team. I'm happy to see them winning though because it's cool to see that the Asian region is starting to show some results internationally.

You were on the brink of making playoffs yesterday, you are in the lower bracket today and you play against ORDER. It starts with Cache, Liazz was having a great game, you ended up dropping the first map, how did it happen?

We really screwed up on Cache, I think we lost two eco rounds, one of them was against USP's, those kind of rounds lose you games. On top of that, we've been losing every single pistol, which makes it that much harder. Overall, on Cache, I would say that we haven't got enough reps as a team and enough practice. We're still trying to transition FNS into the roster, our map pool is a little bit shaky, we haven't gotten to play as much as we want to coming into these events. So we are trying to do the best with what we can. Slip-ups like this really do suck, but we have to make sure that we avoid them in the future.

Inferno was a back-and-forth game, I think that at one point you lost two rounds just by running out of time, practically. What was happening in those situations, was there a communication issue, what was going wrong?

Again, I think it's the same thing, it's just that a lack of practice is really showing. Bringing FNS on the team, we are still trying to implement him into our system and he is trying to call at the same time. He doesn't know exactly how we play, and at the same time, he is trying to bring his own playstyle so these types of situations are bound to come up.

I'm just happy that in the end we pulled through in that game. I have no idea how we did it... I mean, I do actually, RUSH showed up big time with a couple of huge clutches and I'm grateful for that, but we can't rely on individual performances to carry us throughout the event, we have to make sure we look at these problems and make sure they are not happening anymore, in these upcoming days. That will be really important for us moving forward.

You are no longer in-game leading, tell me a bit about how that affects your game. Is it any easier on you? How are you adapting to not being the guy that calls the play?

It's a relief in a sense that I can focus more on my own game and try to give my own ideas without having to dictate the whole round, so me and Tim help out a lot with mid rounds and calling, we try to do our best to help FNS and give him an understanding of how we used to play and what worked for us.

I think it's nice to be able to focus on my own game, towards the end of my period as the IGL I was starting to get frustrated. So bringing in an actual in-game leader that has experience doing it before is a really nice gesture. The main reason I did it before was just that I always wanted to fill in the role that was the best for my team, so if I have to IGL again in the future I will. But If we have someone that is capable of doing it, and it's better for the team, I'm completely ok with that as well.