flamie: "The main problem for us is between the team, not in the game"

Egor "⁠flamie⁠" Vasilyev gave us an interview following Na`Vi's second win at StarSeries, discussing his team's opening blunder against ViCi and more.

Natus Vincere got off on the wrong foot at StarSeries, continuing their tendency to start slow at tournaments with an opening loss to ViCi, but rounds two and three saw them rack up a 2-1 record after triumphs over BIG and Ninjas in Pyjamas.

We caught up with flamie on the third day of the event to discuss what makes his team slow starters and got him to clarify what happened when coach Mikhaylo "⁠Kane⁠" Blagin walked out of their room during Na`Vi's match against Ninjas in Pyjamas.

electronic had quite a big change happen in his life when he became a dad during the Major, did that have any effect on the team in the last couple of weeks?

For the team, I don't think it affected a lot. Maybe for him personally it affected some things, but you can see he is playing well, so I don't think it affected too much for us.

Another slow start for you at StarSeries with the loss to ViCi at the beginning and you didn't even look very competitive on the two maps you lost there - what happened?

I think it's maybe because we came just one day before the tournament and the next day it was an evening game and all of the team didn't feel good, we wanted to sleep and stuff like that, we were jetlagged a bit. It's -5 hours in Moscow and it's not good for us (laughs). But I don't know what happened against ViCi, we just played badly, they played really well, we didn't expect them to play that well.

Why do you think this happens so often to you that you go into a tournament with a very favorable matchup and struggle with it?

I don't know. Almost every tournament we're losing to underdogs, as you can see in the first games. We are trying to prepare, we are just saying that we need to win and every time it happens and we play like sh*t. I don't know why (laughs). But if we manage to qualify for the playoffs, it doesn't really matter. We will see, maybe at the next tournaments we won't play like this in the beginning.

Touching on your series with NiP, was it a surprise to see them come in strong on Dust2, a map they had only picked up recently?

We knew they stopped playing Inferno and practiced Dust2 and we were quite confident on Dust2. We could have won the game, it was our mistake on T side and some crucial economic rounds on CT, we didn't have good rotations. It's okay that we lost, we will review the demo and fix the mistakes for the next game.

After the CT side on Nuke, you had a really hard time closing it out and it took a huge 1v3 from s1mple, how come you couldn't break through?

I think Nuke is more CT sided than it was before. All the teams play good CT sides and it's very hard to play as T. We should have won the pistol, if we won the pistol, the score could have been much more convincing, but we lost and we lost some crucial rounds, as well. Thank s1mple that he got that ace, he played very very well on the T side and he won Nuke for us, so thank you s1mple (laughs).

Kane walked out of the room towards the end of Nuke, what was that about?

Kane thought that he could talk during freezetime and he thought his microphone wasn't working all the time. He went back to take his headset because he couldn't hear us, so that was the reason why he left.

But the rules regarding coaches are the same as at the Majors, right?

Yeah, it was our mistake. But the problem was that he couldn't hear us, so he went to take his headset and everything was okay after that.

Most people have you and ENCE as the biggest favorites here, do you feel you are up to that status despite the start here?

We always come to every tournament as potential favorites, we want to show that we are a strong team. I think right now we are playing much better than on the first day, but still, we need to fix our mistakes and communicate much better because the main problem for us is between the team, not in the game, so we need to fix that stuff first.