kassad: "We had two days of fundamentally bad CS; we made many simple mistakes that cost us both games"

100 Thieves coach Aleksandar "⁠kassad⁠" Trifunović admitted that the team's fundamentals were not on point in their group stage matches at BLAST Premier.

100 Thieves are the first team to drop into the BLAST Showdown event from Group C after losing two straight matches, against G2 and their 2019 kryptonite opponents, Evil Geniuses, both by a 2-0 scoreline.

The Australians were a far cry from the team who peaked at No.5 in the world rankings in late 2019 after an impressive post-break run, and kassad conceded that his side paid the price for sub-par displays in both series.

"We're very disappointed right now, we had two days of fundamentally bad CS," he told HLTV.org. "We made many simple mistakes that should not have been there; they cost us both games."

"We were a little bit indecisive and a little bit stiff, and our fundamentals aren't on point. Right now, we're out of the first stage, luckily there is a Showdown later, so we can come back, but for IEM Katowice it just needs to be better."

The elimination series couldn’t have been against a trickier opponent after 100 Thieves had lost their previous eight maps against Evil Geniuses. The head-to-head record between the two teams seemed to get into the heads of the Australians as they were stomped 16-4 on the first map and wasted three map points on Nuke.

"They didn't do anything special on Train, it was just that we played scared, almost as if we were afraid of them or something," kassad said.

"You can see the rounds where we were supposed to push up but we didn't, rounds where we were supposed to play the post-plant as we played in practice for the last three weeks but we didn't. The fundamentals were not being executed properly, and the outcome was there: 16-4.

"I think we played a decent Nuke, to be honest, and we got them to 15-12. Then there was some sort of confusion in the last three rounds with some poor decision-making in some of the rounds. The initial confusion, where people didn't understand what was actually going on in the round, meant they caught us by surprise, by our own fault.

"It ended up in overtime and we made a couple of individual bad decisions there. I'd need to review the demo to actually see what was going on specifically, but I think that was the case and we ended up losing.

"We need to go back to practice and fix those things to play better. The next tournament is coming soon, so there's no time to whine or cry about it, it needs to be fixed and we need to be better."

100 Thieves will now travel to Serbia for a five-day bootcamp as they hope to cut out the mistakes from their game before the journey to Poland for IEM Katowice, where they will once again G2 in their opening match.

"We're going to change the way we practice to focus on different things and trying to fix them," the coach said. "If we don't, it can end up like this, but if we do we can just win the whole damn thing.