Xizt: "I think that the future for fnatic is really, really good"

As the dust settled in Abu Dhabi after fnatic lifted the PLG Grand Slam trophy, we spoke to Richard "⁠Xizt⁠" Landström about winning the event and their end of 2018.

fnatic came into the tournament as favorites, and lived up to the title by breezing through the group stage and the quarter-finals. The semi-final was a different story, though, as FORZE pushed the Swedes to triple overtime on the last map, Inferno, before fnatic closed it out.

After defeating G2 in the grand final in two strongly contested maps, we caught up with the fnatic's IGL Xizt. As it was already getting pretty late, we quickly went over the whole tournament, as well as revisited some recent results.

We didn't talk at all during this event, so how was the experience for you here overall?

Obviously, there was a lot of delays, but I think the staff was very friendly towards us and they worked hard. There were some technical issues, but overall I respected them even though it wasn't the most perfect event. But the stage looked really cool and the crowd was really nice for the finals.

For the most part you were pretty dominant in your games, there were a few pretty high ranked teams here as well but they look so smooth. Was there something about the way you approached this event? With all of these delays and you being a team that is perhaps experienced in stuff like this from CS 1.6 and how things used to be run, did that help you?

Yeah, we were really tired like everyone else, but we tried to be professional and not go out and whine about it, we tried to do our best. As you said, we have guys with a lot of experience, including myself, being at events with delays from before, so we know how it is and it is the same for everyone, basically. We just have to do our best and try to rest while we are waiting.

I have to ask you about the forZe game that went into triple overtime on the last map. So especially on Inferno it seemed like you didn't play your own game, a lot of random stuff was happening, you were not really playing clean CS. So what was that game like for you, what happened there?

I think we started playing their game, kind of. They were playing really fast and then we started playing really fast, which we usually don't do. We like to play a "chaos game", but in an organized way. But they caught us off guard sometimes and I think we got frustrated. They basically kept doing the same things and we kept falling for it. It was not so good for us, but I think they played really good individually and they shot some really nice headshots. So props to forZe.

You won the tournament in the end, your last event was a month ago, IEM Chicago, where you had a decent placing, decent performance overall, almost beat Astralis. How does that add up for you, the last two events you had of 2018?

I think it is really good for us. Obviously, losing against Astralis was really hard, but we said directly after we lost that we have a great future with this team. We just brought in Brollan who is 16 and twist is also still young, and they are really good. So I think that the future for fnatic is really, really good. We proved here that we can keep our cool and also perform against lower-tier teams, which is really important if you want to be a consistent top team.

As I mentioned, you didn't play in that many tournaments, you didn't participate in the BLAST events, they are leaning towards NiP it seems like... Do you feel like at the moment people are underestimating your level, just because you didn't play that many LANs?

I think it is fair that we are not getting invited to all the events because before we brought in Brollan and twist we didn't perform well at all, we lost in group stages all the time basically and we just have to work hard and eventually we will be in the top five of the rankings and we are going to receive more invites.

I really miss the BLAST events, I attended the first one with NiP so if they want to invite us in the future, I won't mind.

Lastly, what is your outlook from here, 2019 is coming up, the Major and all of that?

This was our last event for the year so we are going to take a break now and start over in the beginning of January. I think we are maybe going to attend one event before the Major, we will see, just to get a feel of how it is to compete again since we are going to have a really long break. We are going to bootcamp for the Major so we are well prepared for that. The first goal is to be top eight in the Major, I think, and go back to the Legends stage.