EliGE: "[The Astralis game] is going to be down to who can fix their mistakes"

Jonathan "⁠EliGE⁠" Jablonowski talked about edging out MOUZ, Liquid's form, and plans for the off days and the upcoming game against Astralis.

Liquid managed to recover from their rocky start in Berlin, where they went down 1-2 after defeats to NRG and AVANGAR. Fighting for survival, the North American side handled North 2-0 before edging out MOUZ in a close series.

Following the game against MOUZ, we caught up with EliGE to follow up on Keith "⁠NAF⁠" Markovic's words about the issues Liquid faced after returning from the player break and more.

I want to touch on mousesports' comeback on the T side of Mirage, how did they manage to be so effective against you and what was the issue in closing them down there?

I think we were giving them way too much room, they ended up having all of the mid control and they were getting Ladder room almost every single round, they were doing basically the same exact strat with a little bit of a different end-game variation. So I think that we just needed to make sure that we shut that down, get in their face, do something different, because us just sitting in the site isn't going to stop that. They are going to end up slowly splitting us, they have the guy in Ladder room that is cutting off our rotations... As soon as we started getting in their faces and switching it up a little bit, that is when things changed.

Moving on to Dust2, at one point it was 15-14 for them, map point, and you had almost nothing in terms of the buy, you had some Deagles. Watching it, I didn't really understand what happened, so can you explain how you managed to win that round?

The round started with fast-catting because they kept going fast mid a lot of the rounds so we were trying to catch that guy off. I ended up seeing the guy on Cat, nitr0 flashed mid after he boosted me so I got that kill and fell back, but I got really lit. So I was just playing headshot angles on ramp and they ended up going three A and one was holding the rotation mid. As soon as they smoked CT and flashed over, two guys dropped down, and I killed the guy that was at bricks holding. I just one-deag him. (laughs) And then my teammates killed the guy mid so the last two guys were CT. As soon as that happened I went onto the A site, fought chrisJ, got that kill, and then the last guy was CT and we knew where he was.

After you got the win, you are obviously going through to the playoffs, you managed to survive the group stage. But even with this last game, are you happy with the way you managed to go through?

I'm kind of happy with how it went, I still think we are making a lot of similar mistakes, but I think that is a good thing. Not that we are making mistakes but that they are really similar and I think we are going to be able to fix them during these next three days. Like our Mirage, I think we are making really similar mistakes and as soon as we go over them and fix them, I think that it is gonna be going really well.

There are obviously no officials to play before the playoffs, but what can you do, what kind of practice is your team going to be doing to get in form for the playoffs?

Any other team, not the teams in the playoffs, but any other team is going to be posting for scrims so we are probably just going to post for three-or-four scrims, and we are going to go over the demos, make sure we fix those mistakes and go over anything that people need to say. Usually, we do that after the official game, we just talk about the main points that we want to fix and then we will go into the demo and look over every single detail.

The bracket hasn't been drawn or decided yet, of course, Na`Vi and CR4ZY still have to play. But it seems like it could be a pretty stacked bracket on one side with you playing Astralis in the first round, what are your thoughts on that?

I think that we obviously messed up by losing so we are going to have a really tough opponent which is going to be Astralis. I don't think they are looking super-on-point either so I think it is going to be down to who can fix their mistakes and start looking a little bit more in form. I think that it is going to be us, I think we are already looking a little bit more confident, we are hitting our shots more, we are a lot more talkative. In the first couple of days, we weren't really as talkative as we normally are, as we were when we were winning everything before. So it started to amp up in these last BO3s on an upward slope and I think that is going to be the main difference-maker for us, to make sure we bring that into the Astralis game and into the playoffs.