gob b: "We didn't underestimate any opponent, but we were very confident going into the final"

The German team, BIG, has had a great week at the ESL studios in Leicester, where they clinched a spot in next season's ESL Pro League and then went on to win the Global Challenge LAN by beating opponents like Windigo and Spirit.

gob b revealed the atmosphere in the team is really good.

In a quick interview by Dust2.us's Michael "DuckMoriarty" Moriarty, Fatih "⁠gob b⁠" Dayik talked about the atmosphere in the team as of late, Johannes "⁠nex⁠" Maget's performance on Nuke, and about the future of the team with Owen "⁠smooya⁠" Butterfield coming on board.

So, gob b, you have masterminded your team to win the Global Challenge. How was the confidence and the spirit in the team?

It has been really good, really great, since we've been playing with LEGIJA. The mood is very good. We had a lot of fun, we just lost one game since then, against Gambit, so we're really confident and the mood is just amazing. Really great.

You went through the tournament just dropping one map against Windigo. A very, very strong performance. In terms of that performance, were you confident you were going to win it?

After we won against Windigo we thought that it was the harder game, but we didn't want to underestimate any opponent. Spirit also played really well, and we knew their Nuke was going be very strong while ours is OK, we're getting better but we're not top-tier on Nuke. It's one of their best and not one of ours, so we knew it could be very close or we could even lose it. We didn't underestimate any opponent, but we were very confident going into the final.

You opened up on Overpass really strongly, and then you had the really close map on Nuke. What do you think of the performance? On Nuke nex was very strong.

Without nex we wouldn't have won Nuke, that's for sure. Normally nex hates the map and never has a lot of kills because his position is not made for a lot of frags, but somehow he made it and that's why he carried us in this map. What can I say? He just dropped 36 frags or something like that which is just amazing.

After this you have some time off before your next event, with smooya. What will the preparations be like before heading to Brazil?

We don't know yet, but it's going to be a lot of fun for sure because smooya is a really cool guy and we like him a lot. It's a little bit hard for us because we're changing the language again, so we have to try and get a very good communication going like we have now. We also have two coaches, kakafu and LEGIJA, they will help us a lot in this kind of case.

I don't know, we'll have to see because now we have a really strong AWPer. We kind of used tabseN as an AWPer this event on some maps, so now he'll be able to be the aggressive rifler again, and with smooya we can also now have double AWP setups. We have a lot of options with him.

Where do you see your team in the next few months leading up to the Major, where you're qualified for the Challenger Stage. Do you see yourself performing well in the upcoming months?

This year starts kind of now, for me, because we tried everything one month before the Major at the beginning of the year. We needed to change a player, that didn't go well, and now we're playing with our coach, who is like a player for us, but we're not ready yet to do really big things. We have everything we need, and I think our core (me, tabseN, and nex) is really ready to do really good stuff because we have a good understanding of the game. It got much better. We just needed everything to fit, and now it feels like it does with smooya and with our coaches, so I hope we can show what we're capable of.