apEX on reading G2 on Inferno: "I felt they were doing only executes"

The Vitality captain shared his thoughts on the match against G2 and how he feels about the upcoming grand final.

Vitality swept G2 2-0 in the second semi-final of ESL Pro League Season 16, recovering from an early deficit on Mirage before pulling off a stellar comeback on Inferno to win the map in overtime. Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire seemed to have a firm read on G2's strategies in the dying moments of the map, and he confirmed as much in an interview with HLTV after the game, stating that the rival international team weren't switching things up much and mostly attempted executes which were easily countered.

The French in-game leader also discussed the adjustments that Vitality made on Mirage to halt an early string of rounds from G2, as well as shed further light on some of the struggles that the team has been working to resolve as Lotan "⁠Spinx⁠" Giladi learns how to play connector. There was also a brief conversation about their upcoming grand final against Liquid and the form of both teams heading into the match, which will kick off at 17:00 .

Let's start with that Inferno game, 11 rounds in a row on the CT side between the second half and OT. It seemed like you had HooXi's number and a beat on their strategies for the latter stages, what was it like on your end?

To go through this CT side, we just stayed really calm, even though I would say it was really bad, I mean we played a really shit T side to be honest. We lost both pistols, and so it just started really bad for us. Then we started to win some rounds and I felt they were doing only executes, not trying to do map control, they were doing execute on the right, execute on the left. We played kinda passive with a lot of nades, so I felt like all the executes they tried to do was right in our favor, we had almost no close rounds, only good rounds for us.

That was tough for them to react, I think playing that way was a bit maybe... I don't know if they were scared a little bit, but I think they should play more... I don't know, differently. They just execute on us, we played passive and we could counter them, so I just think we played really good. We had the right way too, and we didn't change anything because they didn't change either, so we were like 'it's working for us, let's keep going like that.' We changed ZywOo a little bit, playing A, playing B, and us trying to counter them and it worked well.

You played your own game basically.

Yeah yeah. Obviously we saw from the beginning of their T side even though they won rounds, they were doing executes, so I felt like okay, maybe they are going to keep doing it because they see it's working. They didn't adapt and we didn't either because we didn't need to.

But you did have to adapt on Mirage? I know they got off to a good start, NiKo was abusing you on B a bit at first and HooXi was calling well.

Yeah. I do think he did one individual move that killed me and then they abused me, they are playing like a B pop, but we had no info middle. That was the problem because we were playing 3 A passive, 2 B passive, which is one of the worst things nowadays in CS. At 7-3 I just told my teammates, 'guys, we need to get information, no way we can play like that.'

It's actually sometimes our little problem, like Spinx is an amazing player, such a good individual player, but for now he just doesn't get the responsibility to play a bit more aggressive toward this connector area so we don't get info sometimes, and it's really fucked kinda. That was pretty tough for us to hold because when you don't have short and you don't have mid, you don't have anything, they have a lot of space and they can do a lot of things, you're scared of everything and it doesn't go your way.

I think in round 11 I did some crazy shit I'm not going to lie. It was solo kills because ZywOo was B with AWP, I was window, they smoked window, and we kinda know the [M4] silencer if you jump can be good, you know? So I just HE [grenade] underground, jumped and killed NiKo while jumping, waited, jumped again and killed huNter- through the smoke while jumping. I think that if they watch it they will be kind of mad at me, but yeah, then it started from there.

We adapted and played a bit more aggressive, we didn't let them come in because on Mirage it's really tough to play really passive if you don't have the AWP on B. If you have the AWP on B you can play kinda passive on A because you have a crossfire with rifles, but otherwise it's really T sided on A so that was tough for us. When we adapted we won 8-7, so it got better after that.

Talking about working with Spinx to get better at playing connector, was that also a conversation you had after the Outsiders game? That also ended up being really close on Mirage.

It's not about playing good individually, yesterday he didn't play that good individually against Outsiders, but it's just about making decisions as a team. He didn't play in connector for the first six or seven rounds, obviously they had a lot of space, so I just told him, 'boy, you need to play a bit more aggressive, otherwise we're fucked toward B.' He started to do it a bit more, but obviously it's a really new position, and I think connector is one of the toughest position on Earth in CS. It's tough for him and it's easier for me because I played there a lot, but he's more of a star player than me and star players need to play either window, short, or connector.

It's tough for him because it's not yet his playstyle, but when he will get more responsibilities, when he really understands the position more, it will get way easier for him. For now, he just needs to adapt more, we need to play the map more and we need to talk more about what we can do whenever we lose something because for me, that was quite hard to handle B at the beginning because we had no information. Sometimes I can stay B alone with no problem if I know short is covered, but when you know short is not covered, it's tough.

When I talked to Magisk yesterday, something I forgot to ask him was about the long break between the group stage. You were obviously part of Group A, so you were the first ones to play in Pro League and then there was this very long break between that and coming into the playoffs here. How did that effect you, in terms of not really having officials to play before getting here?

Yeah, actually I could feel it most yesterday. Today was a bit better, I think we played better even though on T side it was a little tough, but the rest was good. But yesterday I could feel it, that we didn't play LAN for one month, and I saw that from huNter- I think, he said it was really tough to come and play an elimination game after staying only four days here. It was pretty tough, it's not normal. Normally when you play a quarter-final at least you played games before, you played group stage games, and that was quite tough for us.

We needed to find our communication again, our playstyle, playing together, that kind of stuff, and then map after map it got better. Yesterday it wasn't pretty, I said it, I think we didn't play that good. Today we had three good sides, even though the Mirage CT side wasn't that good, we started really bad and won 8-7 with losing the pistol, I think it's pretty good. I think that today was better, and we had to play better from yesterday, otherwise we would never have beaten G2.

You're not the only person to tell me something along those lines today. When I interviewed EliGE earlier, he said that if they want to beat you or G2 in the grand final, they can't play at the level they've been playing at, they need to step it up as well. How do you feel about your form and how it stacks up to Liquid's going into the grand final now?

I think the final, depending on who the opponent is, is different. It has to be different. Sometimes a team is playing less good than the other, just as any team can step up at some point. Look at FaZe in Katowice, with a stand-in they won. Everything is possible because it's a final, and it's always really special and most likely now with two teams that didn't play a final for quite some time, it can be a big, big thing.

I have no idea how it's going to be, I think if we keep playing like that we have a shot. Obviously we need to play even better if we want to have a better chance, but I think today was quite okay. If we keep playing better after each game, it's going to be really good for us.