Farlig: "I'm doing my best to ignore social media"

After Astralis made it to the IEM Cologne group stage with a close victory over BIG, HLTV.org sat down with Asger "⁠Farlig⁠" Jensen to talk about the German event and the AWPer's first three months with the team.

Astralis stepped into the IEM Cologne Play-in on the wrong foot, dropping to the lower bracket off the bat after a stunning loss to 00NATION in the opening round. Passing Complexity first, the Danes faced off against recent Roobet Cup winners next and made up for the tough first loss with a hard-fought victory over Johannes "⁠tabseN⁠" Wodarz's team to advance to the next stage.

In our interview with Farlig after the second match, the AWPer spoke about Astralis' stumble in the opening match and their recovery in a confidence-inspiring victory against Roobet Cup winners BIG. Farlig went on to look back at his first three months Astralis and how he has adapted to the team, and spoke about community pressure and calls for the return of Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz.

I wanted to go through IEM Cologne first. You guys started out with the loss to 00NATION, and it seemed like a really slow start for you in the tournament. What happened?

It was definitely a slow start, part of it you attribute to a slow start, we lost some really crucial rounds, I remember in particular the 5-4 round, it's haunting us. When we lose the close rounds in a best-of-one it becomes really hard to win the match, right? A few crucial rounds make all the difference, but yeah, we had a slow start and they played well. Props to them.

They were pretty happy about the veto and getting Mirage, is it something you talked about after the fact, that maybe it would have been better to go another way?

Obviously if we would have been completely eradicated the whole game and we felt like there was no chance for us, we would have second-guessed the veto, but after watching it we felt like if some of the crucial rounds went our way we probably could have won it, in our opinion — obviously, they'll have a different opinion. But no, there's no real point of contention there and, in general, I don't think we're a team that's like 'oh, we lost this map' or whatever. Everybody agreed on what maps to play beforehand, so there's no point in bringing any comments after.

I want to ask about the comeback on Nuke that you just had against BIG, where you had a really good second half, especially, on the CT side. What was the key to turning it around from the 1-9 deficit at first?

We were behind 1-9 on the T side as well?! The T side was a real struggle, I remember we were 3-11 and Lukas [gl1ave] did the 1vs3 in the final round and everyone was joking like 'yeah, that was the round we needed, that might actually make us win the game because it's a huge difference between 3 and 4 rounds.' But I don't know, I think we have a belief especially in our CT sides on a lot of the maps, that we have a really good CT side. It's a bit harder to mount comebacks on the T side, but we believe our CT sides are strong, especially on maps like Nuke and Overpass. We believe in the way we play, at least on CT.

This is around to a three-month point for you in Astralis. How do you reflect on these last three months and how you've adapted to the team?

I think I definitely had a pretty hard time adapting in the start. If you look at me now, sometimes you can probably still see that it's the case, right? But I think that we're at a point in which we're... I wouldn't say completely rebuilding, but definitely changing a lot of things on some maps, fundamentally. For example on Overpass, maybe it's not as palpable from the outside, but we completely changed the way we play to make it a bit less structured and stuff like that.

We're changing that on a lot of maps, some of them we've kept a lot of the same, like Nuke, which is a map that, to be fair, we've been pretty good on. We're changing the way we play pretty fundamentally now and when I joined the team we didn't make the changes, initially, we stuck to some of the old structure. We reached a point after IEM Dallas, or a bit before, where we really began making fundamental changes to how we approach some maps, especially ones where we have a tough T side. We're not changing the CT sides that much because, at least in our own opinion, they've been pretty on point.

We're just making some bigger changes now and we have a joke within the team based on the Roobet Cup and the Pinnacle Cup, we had two deep runs and now we're joking about making a third one. But we're really happy that we got this win, specifically, because during my time on the team we've struggled a bit against the better teams. It felt really good to beat a BIG that comes off the back of the Roobet Cup win, to us it felt like we beat a pretty good team.

What about yourself, individually, how happy are you with the way you've been performing so far with Astralis?

Woah! I feel like I've been performing horrifically. It feels horrible playing that bad, right? Not that I'm going to talk myself up like some fucking huge star AWPer, but I feel like I've definitely performed better on my older teams. But yeah, I mean it doesn't feel that great. I'm obviously doing my best to ignore social media because there's more of it when you're in Astralis, but I think it's just a process. If I had to give my own opinion up to this point, obviously I'm not happy with how I'm performing.

What is it you can do better? What's the main problem for you?

It's hard to say, sometimes you have the confidence, sometimes you don't, sometimes it can be really hard to find it, especially when you're in a bad... I guess you can call it a slump, but I wouldn't say I'm slumping, it's just when we have really difficult matches. I feel like I'm getting better at it. At least I'm getting more consistent now, which is a good thing. Some of the maps I'm still struggling on, like Dust2, I never played on any team that was good on it so I feel a bit behind on it, but yeah, I feel like it's getting better at least.

You mentioned the social media pressure. Whenever there's talk about Astralis, it will often go 'what can Astralis do better?' or 'bring back device,' stuff like that is always going to be coming, especially with rumors swirling around. Is this something you try to not let get into your head? How does it affect you?

I definitely try not to think about it. If device comes back what the fuck can I do about it, right? It is what it is, all I can do is play the games that I'm going to play, however many that is. Maybe it's many now, so I try to play them better. Mostly for my own sake because it feels horrible to let down the team, that's what I'm trying to avoid.