gla1ve: "Our consistency is just really terrible individually"

We spoke to the Astralis captain after the first day of play came to an end in Dallas.

Astralis are a far cry from their glory days. Once an indomitable force that was a sure-fire tournament favourite, the Danish team have had a steep fall from grace, and are now fighting just to make it to the playoffs of Big Events. Toward the end of 2021, substantial changes came about as Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif, Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen, and Danny "⁠zonic⁠" Sørensen prepared to depart for Vitality, and Benjamin "⁠blameF⁠" Bremer and Kristian "⁠k0nfig⁠" Wienecke were brought on board from Astralis.

The team have since changed two more pieces, adding Asger "⁠Farlig⁠" Jensen and Martin "⁠trace⁠" Heldt, but a drastic upturn in results continues to elude them, with the organization notably missing out on the top-16 stage of a Major for the first time since its creation when they were eliminated in the Challengers Stage in Antwerp.

To get some insight into some of the struggles the team have been facing throughout the last few months, HLTV spoke to Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander after the first day of play came to an end at IEM Dallas, one where the Danish side lost their opening match to Vitality before securing a win in the lower bracket against ENCORE to keep their tournament run alive.

The 26-year-old spoke candidly about struggling with role overlaps in the team and not living up to their own expectations at the Major, and shared his thoughts on some of the issues that they have been working their way through, citing issues with individual consistency as one of the team's primary issues at the moment.

You're here in North America, the first Big Event we've had in almost three years. You actually won the last big NA event that was here, ECS Season 8 Finals-

[laughing] Oh my god.

-how does it feel to be back here?

It feels good! I didn't even remember that we won the last NA big tournament, but that's nice to know. Of course we wanted to have a bit of a better start, but yeah, it's nice to be back here. The weather here is a lot better than it is in Copenhagen where we're living. It's been nice so far, but of course we want to do better.

Let's talk about how you're doing so far. Lost your opening game to Vitality, and just now picked up a win in your first lower bracket match. Just tell me about your first day with those two matches.

Our preparation was pretty good for the Vitality game, and it was pretty good for this second game as well. I don't feel... we had a bit of jetlag, but it wasn't too bad, and the later it becomes in the day the more jetlag you will feel because you're getting more and more tired. So I don't think that has any reason at all to why we didn't beat Vitality, I just think they played better. ZywOo had a really sick game, I had a hard time on A and he... yeah. It was tough because when we practice we do some of those stuff, but we don't get punished as much-

What do you mean by "those stuff?"

Some of the stuff we do on Vertigo on the CT side, we don't get punished too much, where we try to smoke off one side and flash and peek the other, but ZywOo he just took the duels and was better than us. So that was pretty tough, we got a rough start, lost a 4vs2, lost a second round as well where they had double AKs and stuff, but still it's a pretty tough start for us. If we had a better start on the CT side of Vertigo, it could have gotten a lot closer, but they were the better team and that's why they won.

And now you're in the lower bracket - seeing how Astralis play nowadays, it's not the same kind of expectation compared to the dominant era you had. For you, being in the lower bracket this early and needing to claw back, how does it feel to be in that kind of position more often than you used to be?

Yeah, that's true. Of course it's tough because you've kind of been used to winning a lot of your games, you've been used to going far in every tournament, and now we are just trying to get out of groups and get into the arenas. That's pretty tough for us, it's a new time, and it's something that you have to get used to. Don't think too much about the past, just think how you're getting better in the moment, and how we'll get better in the future.

That's what I'm aiming for, I know we have to climb a ladder, and we've just started. It's a totally new team, I don't compare us to the old team because, why should I? It's almost none of the same players, not the same coach, we don't have the same roles and stuff like that.

Since you mention that, I wanted to talk about something nitr0 told me at the Major. He said "I'm not scared of the word 'Astralis,' I was scared of the players; now I'm not scared at all." I'm not sure if you saw that — [gla1ve nods] — what were your thoughts?

It makes sense to me to be honest, because if they changed their whole team, I wouldn't be afraid of Liquid. You are afraid of the players. If Vitality suddenly doesn't have ZywOo or NAVI doesn't have s1mple, you're not as afraid of them anymore, so it makes total sense if you're not afraid of the team but you're afraid of the players. I think you can compare that to every sport almost.

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nitr0: "I'm not scared of the word 'Astralis,' I was scared of the players, now I'm not scared at all"

But of course, there is something to the name as well, and that's the expectations. The fans, they think about the team a lot, but the players think more about the players. The fans have still really high expectations for Astralis and I can really feel that, we have something to live up to and we're trying that every day, and it really hurts when we don't do it.

Let's talk about not living up to those expectations a bit, obviously the Major didn't go as you would have hoped, it was the first time the Astralis organization itself missed the top 16. With the results there, how did you feel coming away from the event?

I think the general feeling was pretty bad, to be honest. We had huge expectations for ourselves, huge goals I would say, because we actually felt like we could play against the top teams. We just beat NIP online a couple of days or a week before the Major, we played the qualifier for BLAST, and we were close to beating ENCE as well. Those two teams are really good and we think we showed a great game back then, but our consistency is just really terrible individually, I would say, mainly that is the toughest part for us.

In this current meta we have right now, you need really good individual plays all the time, you need people that are able to secure the rounds on their own, stuff like that. I do feel like we are... I don't think that we are too far ahead, tactically, but I feel like that we still have some catch up to do, of course. We've only been playing with Farlig for a couple of months, and we still have things that we want to fix, we don't feel like our playbook is set yet and we still have things that we are changing up a lot of the time.

So we are trying to fix things tactically, but I really feel like the individual is playing a huge factor for us. If we can have people stepping up more, including myself of course, stepping up more, being more consistent, we'll do a lot better in the future.

What do you think is behind that inconsistency for you all right now?

That's probably the toughest question to answer because you don't really know, right? If you knew, then you just fix it immediately, but you don't really know so you have to try some different things, you have to try to find your game, try to figure out how to be as consistent as possible every day, and that's the toughest part for us. When we figure that out, we're going to be a lot closer to the top five, because right now we're not there yet.

How much has trace been helping with some of those issues? Unfortunately he wasn't able to make it to this event, but what has he been bringing to the table since replacing ave?

He's really good at controlling us as players, like when we practice, making sure that we take every game seriously, of course I'm trying to help my best with that but it's really nice to have a guy that is helping me with that because I have to focus a lot on the tactics, what we're going to run, what mistakes we have to fix and stuff like that. To have a guy like that who is making sure that we do our best and getting kind of a structure of our every day, that's really important to be able to evolve.

We talked to you really early into this iteration of the roster about how it was going with blameF in terms of IGLing and what he was helping with at the time. How's that been going more recently, is he still helping out with that at all?

Yeah he is. He's trying his best with helping out, and I'm like, I don't want to implement 100 new things all the time, I want to take it slow and make sure that we are actually capable of playing the tactics that we already have and have more talks about the theory in general. If we don't like any tactics, we need some new implementations, he's good with helping with that. If he has seen something, he's telling me, we take a look at it and stuff like that. He's doing a good job with helping the team, the best he can, and it's nice to have him on board.

The biggest thing with our team that we're trying to figure out is the role clash we have, because... the roles I've been playing on the CT side are the same that blame has been playing always, and I'm trying to figure out how to play the new roles I have. On the T side we have role clashes as well, because blame and k0nfig and me have always been playing the same roles, and on some maps we have k0nfig trying to play some different roles, and on some maps we have blameF trying to play some different roles. That's the biggest part for us, that we're trying all these things. That was also why we tried to make me the AWP player in the beginning, because we had that kind of role clash, so I could be the AWP player and they could keep their old roles, but that didn't work out that good as you saw, so we gotta change back.

That's actually one of our biggest problems, the individual things and the role clash, people not really liking the roles they have, and that's really tough because as you see with every top team, with FaZe, NAVI when they were on the top, they have the roles really set, people knew what to do and they had the same on every map. For us, this is not the case, and we're having a hard time figuring out how to make everyone happy and still performing.

So to be clear, you're not trying to take the AWP from any of your players anymore right?

I'm not going to steal any AWP. As I said, the one where I kind of 'stole it' from Farlig was a tactic we made because we didn't have a lot of time to implement me into the B strats because they had some different things they did toward B, and we thought, 'okay, we don't have much time, let's just give me the AWP when we do this tactic where they go 3 B, and Farlig plays the rifle' because on A Ancient, it can be much easier to hold A when you actually have the AWP. That's why we did it, so no, I'm not about to steal anyone's AWP [laughing].

I wanted to talk a little more regarding those role changes and clashes you mentioned. On top of all of those changes you're also trying to integrate Farlig at the same time, that must be hard to make work.

Yeah, I mean I think the implementation of Farlig is going pretty good. We're learning something new every event, getting better on a lot of maps. It needs to go back to the consistency, because I think that's what we need to rely more on, you see a lot of other teams are relying a lot on individually consistency. We have pretty good tactics on most maps, it's not always that we are managing to play them out as we should, but we're also working on that, we're watching every game we're playing and trying to fix our mistakes. It's taking a lot of time, but we're doing it slowly but surely.

Regarding the tactics on maps, I would say your map pool at a top level has definitely shrunk from your glory days, at least in terms of the overall level you can play against top teams. Is that also a focus for you to work on right now?

Yeah, I think so. We're trying our best to work on the map pool, we're trying our best to work on the maps that we don't feel that comfortable on. We're trying to have a lot of talks about what maps to feel comfortable on, what do we need on different maps tactics-wise, watching some of our games that we lose. We've been losing a lot of games especially on Vertigo and Dust2, also Inferno, and we're talking a lot and trying to fix our mistakes to be able to win those games. Hopefully this will get better in the future, and I hope that we are able to show it already against G2 tomorrow.

Going into that match against G2, not a lower bracket match most would've expected since ENCE were playing against them with a stand-in for their best player. How do you feel heading into that game, probably a difficult one?

Of course it's going to be difficult, I think they're a great team. But they're kind of under the same amount of pressure that we are, they're one of the only teams that is under the same amount of pressure, maybe Vitality as well, because people have a lot of huge expectations for them because they were so good before the change. The same goes for Vitality, so good before the change, and the same goes for us, we were good for a long time, but not so good anymore after the change.

We have kind of the same amount of pressure, and hopefully we can win it this time because last time was really close. We've been having a lot of those close games where we're losing in the end, it's kind of tough, and we need that confidence win against a top team soon and hopefully against G2, that could be nice.