DickStacy: "We'll be staying in Oceania; we have quite a good system back in Australia"

HLTV.org spoke to Ollie "⁠DickStacy⁠" Tierney on the first day of ESL Pro League Season 10 Finals to discuss the squad's new organisation, whether the team plans to relocate to North America and the opening match against Astralis.

The newly-signed Renegades roster found itself in a hard place in Odense after their opening match against Astralis ended with a 16-8 loss on Inferno. The Australian team are now set to face Sharks in the lower bracket, fighting to extend their tournament life.

In a post-match interview, DickStacy expressed excitement with the new organisation, reminisced on the Grayhound days and gave some insight as to what went wrong in the match against Astralis.

Earlier, it was announced that your team had been transferred to Renegades. How did you reach this decision?

Renegades were looking for a roster as their previous team had moved to 100 Thieves, so they let us know of their interest. As Grayhound, we were backed solely by William Gray, the time had come where we had to seek support in other ways, and I feel like Renegades was the right name at the right time. We're very excited to be on board with such an iconic Australian brand and look forward to what the future brings.

Parting ways with Grayhound must have been quite the chapter to close for the team. Reminisce on the journey and give us some insight as to what the road was like with your former team.

Looking back, it was amazing. We came from absolutely nothing. Will (mistergrayhound) started the roster with the goal to become the best Australian team, and there were struggles at first, throughout the year he was going through roster changes with the previous lineups. Once he picked up Chris (dexter) and I came on board, we had the Gratisfaction roster for a while, that's when it started to solidify and we started making movements.

It's been a long journey, we've been overseas quite a lot of times, had quite a lot of losses, but we've learned from them and I feel like we've got a perfect balance now. We know what works, we know what doesn't work and right now it's just about building from there. It's been a crazy journey, we've had a lot of fun. We experienced losses but came better out of it.

Does the team plan to move to North America in the future?

We'll be staying in Oceania, I feel like it's just not in our interest to move overseas. We have quite a good system back in Australia, we believe that bootcamping before tournaments is much more functional and much healthier, especially mindset-wise.

I feel like if you were to move overseas, leave your life behind, that would take quite a heavy toll on certain people, and individuals would react in different ways - you never know how it's going to go. I feel like it's important to have family and friends around because you have a life. We found this way to be more functional and in our best interests. We can work with this, and obviously it has been working. In recent times, we've had results where we've taken numbers off big teams, so it's good.

Did the team feel any additional pressure going into this tournament considering you had just signed with a new organisation?

I guess there was a little bit of pressure, it's your debut and you want to perform. I think there's more individual pressure than anything, I feel like you want to perform well, and that's the pressure you put on yourself. External factors - no, not really. I feel like we're too experienced for that and we enjoy the process too much, so it literally just comes down to how much pressure you put on yourself. Sometimes that can be immense, but sometimes you just have to work with it, you're a professional player.

Let's discuss the opening match against Astralis on Inferno. The initial half was a difficult 3-12 on the CT side for the team, followed by some pushback on the offense, but ultimately a loss. What did you feel that went wrong in the opener?

Their T side has a lot of pressure on every part of the map. When they don't give that pressure, they're still just waiting there, they've still got that one player holding that area of the map. You feel restricted when you move around the map, their map control is very good - you never know their numbers behind the utility they throw, and they control the pace of the game completely on their T side. We haven't really had much experience dealing with that before. It's quite a lot to deal with, and obviously you have to be on point and you have to multi-frag heavily, whereas we didn't get any multi-frags, they were trading very well. That was it, round by round they were out-trading us and we weren't getting any multi-frags, so they took a 12-3 half.

Coming into the T side we felt like we had a bit more control because you can control the pace yourself on the T side, you can make the plays, while on the CT side you're a bit restricted in that regard. We got a couple of rounds throughout, but they played very well in the 2v2s, 3v3s, they caught us off-guard and we ran out of rounds to play with.

You're now in the lower bracket of group B, facing Sharks in your next match-up. What are your thoughts on the series?

I like it better than Astralis, that's for sure (laughs). It's a tough match-up, and we've got to take it very seriously, but I do like our chances. We're out to prove ourselves, and it's a good match-up to show what we're capable of.