cadiaN: "We have been very good at keeping the mood high while being behind a lot"

We spoke to Casper "⁠cadiaN⁠" Møller after North made it to the semi-finals at ECS with a closely-contested 2-1 victory against NRG.

The Danish side pulled off a huge comeback from a 4-12 deficit on the Terrorist side of Nuke to kick off the series, with NRG striking back on Inferno after double overtime, before North secured the win with another turnaround, this time from being down 1-8 on the CT side of Cache.

After cadiaN's team locked the last spot in the playoffs, we interviewed the in-game leader to get his thoughts on the tight series and their upcoming match with MIBR in the semis.

Talk me through the comeback on Nuke at first, from being down 4-12, that's quite a feat, how did you manage that?

When we started to play Nuke, our T half has actually been literally insane, but in the recent official games we've been struggling a little bit with the T side and having way more success with the CT. And, finally, I felt like we hit that groove on the T side where the pace is high and we consistently know how the opponents are going to react to certain things, which is why I think the comeback was good.

valde's 1v5 was one for the history books, which definitely helped us, as well, but I feel like we were just overrunning them with set fast plays and not really playing the slow-paced game, where things can go wrong.

It almost looked like you were going to close it out on Inferno, but it slipped away at the end - tell me about the decision making towards the end, especially in the last round of regulation, in which you decided to rush B and it backfired.

Actually, on the T half of Inferno, it ended up being maybe people trying to help me too much. There were consistently a lot of ideas of what we could do, and even though a lot of the ideas are good, sometimes it's hard when you as a caller lose track of your own ideas. So that's why I kind of felt like Inferno slipped away, I felt like when we were just listening to me and people were playing structured and not playing any unnecessary moves we would win.

So, in the end it got a bit chaotic and people came in with the idea of rushing B and me as a leader should maybe say no, but we ended up being like 'f*ck it' because we knew they had low utility, they won the previous round with CeRq's 1v1 clutch against me so they shouldn't have a lot of money for nades, which is why we decided to rush B at the end of the day.

Why do you think you couldn't close it in overtime, then?

On their T side, NRG had a good idea of us sometimes playing three B and they kind of abused coming out of halls quickly, which is something we need to look at because that has happened in the past as well.

Maybe they just adjusted a little bit better in overtime because we tried to maintain banana control and, actually, NRG stole what we called our default we used in Rogue with the top smoke between sandbags and corner, which is super annoying because it denies a lot of aggressive CT plays and that's why we kept being in the dark and had to guess if they were actually trying to take banana control or not.

On Cache, after you picked up the pace it looked like you were in the driving seat, was that how you felt during the game?

Both yes and no because, at the end of the day, we were down 1-8, but it was exactly the same score as when we played them in Chicago, we were also down 1-8, 2-8. When we started getting the momentum going, I kept saying to the guys that it's the same scenario as in Chicago, we can do this, we've been in this scenario before.

We have been very good at keeping the spirit and the mood high while being behind a lot of rounds, which is essentially why we also came back on Nuke. Yeah, we had a phenomenal T side, but we also grinded the five rounds as CT in the end. So, in terms of Cache, I feel like our Cache is pretty underrated, we are 3-0 at this point.

People were caught by surprise when all of a sudden North was playing it because North has never played it, and I kind of feel like NRG could have taken the third map to Train instead, which is a map they have beaten us on in the past. Going to Cache, which they lost to us in Chicago, we felt pretty confident.

You touched on it a bit, it looks like you are actually capable of playing all maps, are you that confident with your map pool and to alternate based on opponents or do you have some of them to catch up on?

Oh, for sure we have stuff to catch up on. I would even say on all seven maps we can still improve by a large margin. We keep developing new things, some of those things worked against Liquid and a few against NiP, as well.

We're still far from being at our top level and I think we need to improve a lot on our map pool in general, still, because there are still weaknesses. But, we also don't have two weak maps, so I don't feel like an opponent ever has a free map against us in the veto, which I think is super important, not having to go down 0-1 consistently.

To finish off, how do you feel about your chances in the semi-finals against MIBR?

Honestly, I feel like they are kind of on the way back, but they are a difficult team to rate because they didn't look good in Chicago and they didn't look good at BLAST. But, at the end of the day, these guys are legends of the game, they are Major winners, all five of them on different teams, so they definitely have the ingredients, it's just about mixing it in the right way.

I think it's going to be an interesting battle. I played a lot against these guys when I was with Rogue in NA and with mixed success, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the match is going to go tomorrow.