smooya on individual drop-off: "All my life I've been a selfish player, so I thought I'm going to try to reel it in"

After making it through the IEM Katowice Play-in, Owen "⁠smooya⁠" Butterfield talked about his individual decline in the opening stages of 2022 and fnatic's run in Poland so far.

After fnatic made big strides following their addition of smooya late last year, the Swedish-British mixture entered 2022 on the wrong foot. They finished in last place of the Funspark ULTI 2021 Finals and went out in 5th-8th place in Pinnacle Winter series, losing to BIG, Astralis, and the new Apeks roster in the process.

In the few matches the team played there and so far in IEM Katowice, smooya hasn't been up to the high standards he had set when he first joined fnatic, now sitting at a 1.03 rating in the past three months, a hard fall from his 1.22 average rating at the beginning of his tenure.

We talked to the Brit after fnatic made it through the Play-in stage in Poland to find out what has been behind his drop-off.

"When you have so much success and we were winning every game 16-13 and I go from having 28 kills to like 18, of course the game will be flipped," smooya said before delving into the reasons behind his brief decline.

"My entire life I've been quite a selfish player, always baiting a little bit. Of course I have an AWP, so I'm allowed, but [I was doing it] maybe a little bit too much, which is of course why I had crazy numbers. So I thought 'I'm going to try to reel it in a little bit.'"

"Prime example: If we have 5 Glocks, a full antieco, Mirage, rushing out palace, I have top spawn, I'm going to hit a quick 360 around the pillar so I don't get first killed there, I'm that kinda guy. I threw all that out of the window, and my confidence has gone [downhill], but I'm going to try to go back to go full bait mode and get confident again."

smooya went on to talk about the team's run so far at IEM Katowice, where fnatic suffered a tough defeat at the hands of Copenhagen Flames before beating Wisla Krakow and BIG, pulling off a huge comeback from a 3-12 deficit on Ancient against the latter in the process.

Out of the four teams fnatic could match up against in the group stage next, the AWPer picked out one name that he wouldn't want to face and one that he'd prefer:

"Anyone but Gambit. I want Vitality - I want you, ZywOo. That's all I'm saying."

"We've lined up good against them in practice and I really wanna play against apEX when he's shouting like a crazy guy. That's a goal of mine."

You can watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.