kassad on keys to Renegades' recovery: "Definitely hard work and open communication between everyone"

We sat down with Aleksandar "⁠kassad⁠" Trifunović after the team advanced to the StarSeries i-League Season 8 lower bracket to discuss the team's run at the Turkish event and their overall recovery following the break.

Renegades have now secured at least a top-four finish at StarSeries with a repeat victory over MIBR and are set to clash with the other Brazilian team still alive in the tournament, FURIA, at the end of day six in the lower bracket final.

We interviewed kassad ahead of the match against Andrei "⁠arT⁠" Piovezan's team to find out what had gone wrong on Friday, when Renegades looked stunned in the upper semis against Evil Geniuses, and ask him about their rematch with MIBR.

Let's go back to yesterday at first, where it looked like you were a bit off against EG, a rough series there, what happened?

Against, EG, like you said, it was a bit of a rough series for us, especially in the first map. I think the main problem that we had yesterday is that our comms were a little bit off — not a little bit, way off. Some things that we usually communicate properly and do a million times, we kind of screwed up those things by not communicating and it affected a bunch of rounds. EG are a group of very sharp, sharp players and they seemed very on point and switched on, so it was a really bad series for us yesterday, but we bounced back.

Tell me about the rematch with MIBR. It was a really close match in the opening series of the tournament. This time it looked a lot cleaner, at least outside of Train, why was it so different on Inferno and Mirage?

It was different on Inferno especially because we started off pretty well. We watched the first game immediately after the best-of-three, we made a lot of mistakes there, we talked about what needs to be fixed, what was good and what was bad, and we fixed those things going into this map against them. We just discussed them again just before the game and we started off pretty well. And you saw the score at the end, 16-6, a pretty good map for us. When we switched on Train, they had a pretty good CT side and we went out of our comfort zone there and we had an issue that we discussed after the second map, that when we are at a round deficit, behind a few rounds, we start to make more individual calls, we tend to step off the game plan and it costs us sometimes, like it did on that map. But we discussed it immediately in a productive way and we went into Mirage and just did our thing.

Did you expect them to pick Train the first time around, as well, instead of Dust2?

Oh yes, definitely, we expected Train in the first series. I guess they had their reasons why they picked Dust2, which wasn't really a bad pick by them by any means, we had it somewhere in the back of our heads that they might pick Dust2 and we were ready for that, obviously. In this series, it was the same approach, the primary map that we were preparing for was Train. Didn't really work for us, but we did our preparation properly, luckily we won.

Later today you're going up against FURIA, a matchup you've previously only played once back in Cologne during the off period, how do you expect to match up against them this time?

Oh yeah, we did play them, they eliminated us from Cologne. Back then, both teams were in a different kind of position, FURIA was a rising team, they were playing really well, we had our own problems. Now it's a little bit different. They're still a really dangerous team to play against, they've shown it here at this event, and right now we just need to sit down, prepare for that game properly, and just go in with maximum focus.

I already asked Gratisfaction about your recovery from earlier in the year, what do you think led to that outside of just catching up with practice?

Definitely hard work and open communication between everyone. I don't know if Grat said it, after Chicago, that was our last tournament in the summer, we sat down in the pracc room and we discussed everything for about four or five hours, what was wrong, we discussed attitudes, we discussed every single problem that we had to discuss. We agreed on a new approach and we agreed to be open and honest with each other about everything. It was a very productive talk in all the aspects and we just went on a break knowing what we need to do when we come back. Everybody was fresh when we came back, we went into that boot camp and we did exactly what we agreed on, and that's something that was really, really important for us to do so that we could come back into form. Obviously, it worked, we are feeling great right now as a team, as a unit, and we're just looking forward to the future.