Nifty: "We would really like to have someone behind us who is hyping us up"

Continuing our coverage of StarSeries i-League S5, we interviewed Noah "⁠Nifty⁠" Francis to hear about his team's tough start in Kiev and how he feels calling without Aleksandar "⁠kassad⁠" Trifunović.

Renegades were completely blown out in the opening game of the tournament, losing 2-0 to GODSENT with both maps finishing 16-3. The Australian team looked better on day two against HellRaisers, but still weren't able to get the win, going to the 0-2 bracket.

With a scrappy win over Gambit, Renegades managed to stay alive in the tournament, so we sat down with Nifty to hear about the game and how the team is feeling at the moment.

I'll start by contrasting IEM Sydney, which was a pretty good event for you guys, with ESL Pro League that followed which was not that good and the start here which was rough as well. With those contrasting results, how were you guys feeling coming into the third day?

I think we are finally starting to get a little bit more comfortable here, absolutely no excuses at all but we seem to have been affected a little bit more by jetlag this time around. Sleeping patterns are messed up, sometimes we are eating at weird times, it just kind of throws people off of how they normally do things. As far as the games go, we have been having issues here and there, but like I said, we are starting to get a little bit more comfortable, it's nice.

Sydney was great, Dallas was just different because we already knew that our coach was leaving but he was still there, working with us. It was just weird. We didn't have the greatest performance there but it's cool, it was a good experience and we had fun.

You had a few blowout defeats here, against GODSENT and the last map against HellRaisers. The latter one was kind of funny, I came in when you had just lost 16-1 and everyone on your team was laughing, so I was wondering what was going on, and then I saw jks got his first kill. But back to the question, is there a common denominator that messed you up on those maps, except what you mentioned before?

Well... we had trouble trading kills the past few days and just hitting shots, every single one of us. That obviously doesn't help because it isn't going to net you a lot of rounds (laughs). But on top of that, the morale wasn't that great, we weren't talking as much as we should've been, or in the right manner.

But as far as laughing after our loss to HellRaisers, it was the last round of the game, 15-1, and we are just dropping like flies. Justin (Justin "⁠jks⁠" Savage) comes rotating in, I'm already dead and I'm just watching him and I'm like "please, please get a kill" (laughs). I see him jumping on the bomb train and he uses all 12 CZ bullets to actually get the kill, and then he screamed and went "YES!". So we were just having some fun with that. And SK was behind us, they were like "yeah, you don't want to see your player go and hurt himself, or feel really depressed" which I agreed with. I'm glad he got that one kill.

Moving on to the Gambit game, Cache started pretty scrappily, can you give me your view of how that game went?

It was pretty back and forth when we entered overtime, but we were just having trouble on the T side, coordinating our hits together. We did a lot of B hits but there were some times when we got into B when we just messed up, Dosia was holding the bomb site from us. And there was once or twice that we had the bomb down but our post-plant was kind of iffy, so that lost us some rounds. All in all, we tried on the T side, but on the CT side we played really really well, I was trying to be more mobile with the AWP to actually get some things done - it was a fun match.

On Mirage, you had a 13-7 lead and they started getting those rounds back on CT, did you feel that it could get out of hand if you don't close it out?

It does start to feel like that, a little bit, there is always this lingering thing there. But I mostly felt like we got it, like I shouldn't be concerned. It hurts when you have those leads, especially when you haven't built up a lot of money, if you lose once or twice in the row, you're going to have to double save, and that already gets them back to 13-12, so you really didn't have as big of a lead as you thought you did. So it always makes it weird there.

We hit the 14-14 mark, the round before that we just chilled around in T spawn and collected ourselves, then we paused and talked about what we want to do in that round. We did it and it worked, it worked really well actually. And then the last round it was kind of the same thing, I think we used the last pause in the last round. I could be wrong, but we tried to stay collected and we talked.

Is the lack of a coach, kassad not being with you, is it felt in the games?

Without kassad it's different, having another person there, especially a person like kassad, it brings a whole new piece to the game, a whole new set of energy. When I hit timeouts before I could always expect something from him. Either just "keep doing what you're doing", or maybe he had an idea, or he would just be talking to us or something like that. It's different, you know, I'm learning how to talk to my team more in timeouts. A lot of this stuff is new to me, I feel like there are a couple more things running through my head then there usually is, It makes it different, makes it harder for me to perform sometimes, it's going to take some time to grasp on to.

I presume you are already on a lookout for a new coach, is there anything special you are looking to get from him?

Yeah, we are definitely on a lookout for a new coach. We want to get somebody that fits our guys, but someone that doesn't become too friendly with us, kind of stays our coach, stays as an authority of the game, I suppose. It's funny, we talked about it, he doesn't have to be a crazy tactician coach, you know, but we would really like to have someone behind us who is hyping us up, giving high fives, talking loudly, maybe yelling at the other team - that kind of stuff. We talked about that and we really want that in a coach, it's important to us.

In an interview in Sydney, jks mentioned that he wants to do a bit more of secondary calling, helping you out. Is that something he has been developing in, maybe now with kassad out of the picture?

Not necessarily, the way that was worded was actually weird (laughs). However, there was a time when we were talking a little bit about it because it is nice to have some help. But what we have been doing as of late, when we take our pauses or we have our in-between time, we usually talk as a team, I want to hear from everyone. Whatever a suggestion might be, we might go with it or we might not. That's how it's working right now, we don't have anyone dedicated to mid-round calling or anything. I'm still pretty much handling that myself.