Jerry: "If we manage to break this barrier inside our heads we'll be able to qualify"

A staple of FORZE rosters, Andrey "⁠Jerry⁠" Mekhryakov is still trying to get the best out of his troops following their close win against GamerLegion.

Jerry 's squad desperately needed to bounce back after a thrashing from HEROIC on their opening game of the European RMR. A close match against the Swedish core seemed to be turning for the worse, with FORZE staring down a 13-14 deficit with momentum on the side of the defenders. A clutch timeout before Round 28 turned their fortunes around, quickly equalizing the score before edging Mirage 16-14.

Before moving into their next practice session, the Russian in-game leader found the time to speak to us about everything regarding FORZE's youngsters, their LAN experience, and the barriers they have to cross to reach the next level.

Congrats on your win, you are 1-1 now but let's get started with the match against Heroic. It was a pretty rough game, how do tell everyone "okay forget about this game, we can do this" to reset after that loss?

So the game against Heroic was pretty rough, but still, we could have taken more rounds because we knew exactly how cadiaN approaches the game, but the thing is that he's a very good IGL and it's really hard to read him. After the game, I told my teammates: "guys it's your first LAN, we played against cadiaN, one of the best IGLs. Okay, we did bad rotations but still, you showed some amazing moments. Norwi, you showed `some headshots with the Deagle, everyone saw it and everyone was surprised you can do it on LAN. It's your first LAN, your first international LAN so bro, you should be proud of yourself."

What about shalfey? he's not really open to playing Overpass, he doesn't like it much, I don't know why. We just looked at the game, checked the demo and looked for some basic mistakes, and said: "okay, we made Heroic bleed, we are able to do more. Let's chill for 20 minutes, get some warmup going and let's go to the stage and show we're capable of something."

Moving to the GamerLegion game, it was very close. You were 13-14 down, you paused the game and then everything changed after that. What happened?

Oh, that was a game-changer pause. It was the fourth one, the fourth out of four, the last one! In this particular pause, we discussed how we can approach a fast game against them, because when we were playing slow we were missing some basic information, losing some advantages we could have created playing fast.

We decided that we were going to smoke window with a little bit of a delay and instantly go out mid with a flash from the fourth guy, three guys go out and with the fourth guy flashing and we instantly get mid control in case they are jumping short or were waiting for the window smoke to land, or even in case they were trying to peek connector. We were ready for everything because the last guy was going to wide box anti-flash, so if something happened, like them trying to retake, we are ready.

That really helped us and I was able to give some calls like: "They smoke connector first time, let's just sit left and right of connector, zorte can go catwalk and watch firebox for us and we will just go through this one-way smoke instantly once it disappears." Our coach Fierce, helped us construct this round so we could have one player in front of A and one massive attack towards mid. He was helping me very much with this one.

You are now 1-1 and there are some pretty tough teams in the pool. People like OG, fnatic, Vitality, and one out of Outsiders or BIG - how will you tackle this, and what challenges will you face?

We've been practicing against Vitality and I think since they changed roster to the international team they are not as good as they were before when they were speaking only French. But Vitality have ZywOo and he's a cheater [laughs] so they are hard to deal with but we'll have some time before the game, and once we sit down we'll realize what we have to do, we'll try to make a game plan, watch some demos, etc. For OG they are good aimers, they are not a "big pressure team" like, they don't pressure on every side of the map, A, B, mid, everywhere. They are good aimers and they don't play really slow, I like that game style and I think we'll be pretty comfortable against them.

fnatic just made a lot of roster changes so I think it's a 50-50 game for us, it's the only game I can give a percentage and it's a coin toss [laughs]. About BIG or Outsiders, I would like to face Outsiders because it's a CIS derby and I really like derbies because games go really rough and hard, but it's a big opportunity because everyone on our team will want to prove that they are better in their region, and that's why I like it. It gives us even more motivation, it's 100% already but it will be 123%.

I talked to YEKINDAR earlier and he said that he liked you because you always take new people and get some results, does that mean that you've had some practice with other European teams and had some good results?

We've been practicing mainly with teams from Group B, it was Astralis most of the time because they like to practice with us, I don't know why. We've had results like 17-13 on one map, and on the next map they destroy us 20-10, so there was always a lot of material to work on. I think we've had enough practice, but the thing is that the experience from your first LAN it's kinda shakey, so I need to talk every time and make decisions for players on the other side of the map sometimes for this particular roster at this LAN.

I think if we manage to break this barrier inside our heads we'll be able to qualify for the next stage, because we've had practise, boot camp, we have zorte, we have shalfey, we have B player, we have IGL, we have KENSI that sometimes can go really mad - what else do we need? Only confidence inside our heads and break the barrier.

By the end of the tournament, what would a good performance look for forZe, what do you want to achieve from this?

The main goal is to qualify for the next stage and get stickers for my boys, that's the main goal. If we talk about the sub-goal, it's to beat some good tier-one team, could be Vitality or OG as I mentioned earlier, so if we can beat them, even in a best-of-one that'll give us more confidence and we'll be able to break that barrier.

That barrier is something like "this is ZywOo, I am not able to kill him because his model is really fast or something," If you just mute everyone, you will see this is just a model in the game, you don't have to care who is playing against you, only if you are playing against him in like two years and you know his habits. In this case, we have one goal and one sub-goal, only two.