chrisJ: "I think we used the time [after the Major] quite well"

We sat down with Chris "⁠chrisJ⁠" de Jong after his MOUZ finished first in Group A to hear his thoughts on the current state of his team and the goings on in New York.

MOUZ made two reverse sweeps in two days, first against fnatic and then against Gambit, to secure a first place in Group A and secure a spot in the playoffs at the Barclays Center, where they will face the second place team in Group B.

In the interview below, chrisJ opens up about the state of MOUZ after the 0-3 group stage exit, goes in-depth into the hiccups the team is working through, the importance of a good result in New York, and what is to come after today's victory.

Let's start with a different question than usual. Do you think it's a stressful time right now for a lot of teams in the CS ecosystem?

Well, it certainly is for ours, but I think it applies to many teams as well. The Major was obviously really important to a lot of teams, and I feel like a lot of them weren't as ready as they should have been for it because it was right after the player break. Also, the Major is still fresh in everybody's memory right now, so yeah, it's hard to focus really hard on this tournament right now.

That brings up two questions. The first one is about the Major being fresh in people's mind. Do you think coming here right after the Major is affecting the results of the matches?

I suppose so, yeah. It depends a bit on how you did at the Major, and how it affects you, I guess. For a team like Gambit, who realized they're not going to continue with the same lineup... And this may have been going on for some time, but they stayed together maybe thinking they could win the Major again, but they didn't... So the team breaks up, and they go into a tournament like New York feeling really weird... Na`Vi on the other hand almost won the Major, so they're obviously still a bit disappointed, especially because they didn't play that well in the final...

We're still thinking about it, of course, but for me, it didn't really feel super negative. I don't really know if it's the same for my teammates, but I feel like we lost at the Major, we lost BO1s, but we didn't lose any to a really bad team. We only lost to top 8 teams. I came here thinking "OK, we can just prove we're good, let's do our best." There have been tough matches up to now, but we were able to fight through them.

The second question references what you said about several teams' lack of preparation for the Major. Is yours one of them?

I think suNny said it in an interview, as well, that many of the players in the team didn't have that many hours clocked in, and that certainly didn't help us. Who knows, even if you all play over 120 hours it doesn't mean you'll win, but it often means that players are in better shape. I don't think the team was in particularly good shape, suNny did well every match, but the rest of the players sometimes did OK and most of the times didn't do so good, so we were certainly not in our best form.

You went out in the groups in London, which gave you a little bit more time than some of the teams here to prepare. Did you use it? How?

Yeah, we used it for sure. We went back home as soon as we went out at the Major. We were all obviously disappointed, but we were also thinking that we haven't been a team that long, so it's not that surprising that we didn't go to the final of a Major or something. Obviously, 0-3 hurts a lot, and having to go through the Minor made it hurt even more, but you go out in groups sometimes and that's just how it is. I feel like we recovered quite OK. We got home and the next day we started practicing, so we had an extra week compared to some of the other teams here, and I think we used the time quite well.

With the rough result at the Major, did that put any extra pressure for you to perform here?

Yeah, I think so. We surely didn't want to end last again (laughs). We were really close to losing both matches here so far, but we kept believing and once we got rolling we played really well.

Tell me a bit more about that. Yesterday you went all the way to overtime in the second map against fnatic. You were really against the ropes. How did you bring the matches back?

We got into a really bad spot against fnatic. It was comparable to the situation we were in at ELEAGUE against them, when we lost the first map. We felt kind of unlucky and had some miscommunication, which I thought was because people didn't listen. Then here on T side on Train I felt like people didn't listen again, so I was in a bad mood which didn't help, the atmosphere was really bad. We had some fights because we didn't want to lose to fnatic with a stand-in, and so on.

On the CT side we won an impossible round with all of us on pistols except oskar with an AWP when we were behind and it was like at V4 when we were behind VP by quite a large margin, and like when it happened against fnatic at ELEAGUE on Train. After that, somehow, we got the CT side rolling and everybody was just thinking back to those matches and we started to believe, "OK, we can still do this!" We just started believing, and talking, and hitting our shots. We just took that momentum from that CT side to the next map and from there on out we started playing really well.

I feel like today we had similar struggles, we may have underestimated Gambit a little bit on Train. We wondered why they picked Train against us because we have such a good CT side, but then they win the pistol, they reset us, and suddenly we were down 1-6... So yeah, we had some trouble on Train, but after that, we knew we had Dust2 and Nuke where we feel like we're especially good on the CT sides, and that helped us stay confident.

You talked a bit about miscommunication, a bad atmosphere, which is something oskar touched upon before, too. Tell me a bit about the whole communication breakdown and what's causing it.

We talked about it as a team. We set quite high expectations for ourselves, especially after the roster move, and we were hoping to do better than we have been doing. We made semis twice, which is OK when you think about it, but you don't expect to go out 0-3 at the Major... We maybe even didn't expect to lose more than one game there because we feel like we can be so good. I think that makes people, including me and other players, more frustrated, and when we're frustrated we talk less, we don't want to talk to each other...

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but it happens to me sometimes, when things don't go well... I feel like "OK, wtf? People aren't listening, people are not doing this and that," and then things can just spiral out of control because you're put in a position that you thought there was no way you could end up in like fighting to not go to the Minor or something like that. We just thought that Winstrike were going to the Minor again and we don't even need to think about that, then suddenly you're there and we thought we would be way better. It's something we need to realize, we have a lot of work to do and it's something we're trying to approach now, realizing we're not a top 3 or top 5 team at the moment and that we need to start from the ground up again in a certain sense. We really need to fight for every match against every opponent.

Have you taken some measures to get the communication issues under control and the team back together again or are you just fighting through it?

Yeah, I feel like we're working together. Everybody realizes the team is not going the right way, so we're trying to realize that we need to work together again, we need to talk a lot because that's how we won tournaments in the past, that's how we got far, that's how we got into playoffs a lot and how we made finals, by talking and playing together, not by everyone just trying to get kills and being the hero. If someone is having a bad game it doesn't matter, everyone needs to keep talking and we need to keep working because a teammate can still step up. It's a process that we all need to realize again.

We talked a bit of the bad and the negative, but you're first in the group, you're in the playoffs, congratulations! Tell me what's going on moving forward.

I'm not sure we'll practice tonight. If we can find a team we may play a couple of maps, and probably the same tomorrow, maybe play like three or four maps. We don't want to play too much, but enough to stay in shape. Obviously, we'll wait to see who we play next. We'll watch the matches, but on the other hand, we don't want to overprepare because we feel like we want to regain our own level and our own communication and not worry too much about thinking what the opponents are going to do or whatever. We feel like if we communicate well and react well mid-round we can be really good.