Aleksib: "At some points, I could feel it that the guys had a lot of tension playing against NAVI"

Aleksi "⁠Aleksib⁠" Virolainen spoke to HLTV.org after G2 advanced to the grand final of IEM Katowice, discussing the semi-final match.

In their first full event with the new lineup, G2 made it to the grand final at IEM Katowice, bringing down Natus Vincere for the first time in the core's history in the semi-finals in two maps.

In a short interview by the side of the stage, Aleksib shared his thoughts on G2's historic win against Natus Vincere and surviving the CIS team's comeback attempt on Mirage.

The Finnish in-game leader also spoke about the contribution of François "⁠amanek⁠" Delaunay, who was brought in ahead of the semi-finals in case the team needed a player to step in and stood behind the European side instead of Rémy "⁠XTQZZZ⁠" Quoniam, who tested positive for COVID before the playoffs.

It seemed on the first map especially that it was quite straightfoward. Was there something in particular in your game plan that you had in mind for NAVI on the T side of Inferno?

We had a good plan on how to go B, at least at the start. Then when I had the feeling that they're going to play 3 B, we transferred towards A, and I think everything went according to plan.

In the end the game was 10-2 and I feel like after that we kinda lacked focus, we started doing all kinds of things and people overcalled each other and got maybe a bit too hyped to close out the half. I feel like if we stuck to our plan the whole T side would have been more clean, but we still managed to get 10 rounds.

We had a really good plan on CT as well, I feel like it was one of our smoothest map picks considering that all the things we wanted to do on gunrounds worked, and when we played to lose we started losing. As soon as we went back to our own gameplan everything went well.

I wanted to ask about AMANEK. I saw in the timeout that you took just before you closed the first map that there was a lot of talking from him, which came as a surprise considering he only just stepped in. Did he get a pep talk from XTQZZZ, or how did he contribute?

We had a really brief discussion with him. He just arrived and we had to focus on the prep in this game, so we didn't really talk too much about how he should be. But it was okay, after the map switch we had a small discussion on how to improve it a little bit, still, and going into tomorrow we need another discussion. It's obviously been such a short time.

The thing was, he took some timeouts sometimes when we feel like we maybe don't need them, but at the same time it was a decent thing from him because we could calm down. Let's say that we wanted to keep playing, it's still a decent thing because we calmed down, and as I said, whenever we focused on our own plan everything went well, so when he took a timeout we could really breathe and went through the round from start to finish and then we finished the half.

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What were the problems that you encountered in the second half of Mirage and how did you eventually manage to close it out after NAVI mounted the comeback?

At some points in the T half I kinda had the feeling in the back of my mind, I could feel it that these guys had a lot of tension playing against NAVI, and I could feel that these guys felt we were going to 2-0 them. To me, it was pretty hectic on freezetimes, then I tried to get the grasp of the team again, but then we took a timeout and it was AMANEK talking, and it was a bit confusing at the start.

But then we went a bit in our own game and won a couple of decent rounds. The best thing that happened in this T side was that we fucked up one round so bad, where we dropped some smokes in T spawn and we couldn't find it, we kept running around. So we completely missed the timing and lost the round. But then we repeated the call without failing this utility and it ended up working, and that gave us the momentum in the end to close it.