gla1ve: "The organisation sometimes wants to try something different, you gotta respect it and do your best to keep your spot"

Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander sat down with HLTV for a talk after his team recovered from an opening loss to put away Eternal Fire.

Astralis ended last season on a high, grabbing a top-four finish at IEM Cologne and rising to No. 3 in the world rankings. Since the player break that progress has faltered, with the team suffering early exits from the BLAST Premier Fall Groups and ESL Pro League Season 16.

Already in a rut, the Danes' preparations for the RMR were dealt a hammer blow when Kristian "⁠k0nfig⁠" Wienecke was forced to withdraw from the squad through injury, forcing the squad to bring in Astralis Talent youngster Mikkel "⁠MistR⁠" Thomsen as a stand-in.

Despite the tough circumstances and suffering a loss in their opening game, Astralis showed resilience to bounce back with a victory over Eternal Fire. After that win gla1ve gave an interview to HLTV to talk about his team's results so far, how it has been integrating MistR into the squad, and the effect the rumours surrounding the team have had on the players.

It must feel great to be on the board?

Yeah it feels really good.

It was a tough game against NIP (chuckles), we couldn’t do any prep against them because they changed their AWP player and also have a new in-game leader. We rely a little bit on anti-stratting I would say, not because we can’t play without, but it’s a big advantage for them to play Nuke where they have a lot to watch of us and we had nothing. I don’t think we played that good however, we lost some stupid rounds.

The next game felt really good, against Eternal Fire, they are a strong team and one of the best in tier-two I would say at the moment. They are getting some pretty good results and have a good map pool, so we are happy with that win.

Obviously you came into this event with a last-minute stand-in, is it tough to get into the right headspace under those circumstances?

It’s always tough to play with a stand-in, I think especially for me because I feel like I have a responsibility to help him a lot, trying to make sure he remembers what he needs to do in different tactics. We have a lot of maps that he needs to learn. I think that has been pretty tough.

In practice it has actually been going pretty well I would say, not beating all of the good teams but beating the teams we kind of should, so we came into the tournament with a bit of confidence. Of course it was pretty tough to evolve on that confidence after the NIP game, but this one will help.

MistR had some impactful rounds against Eternal Fire, particularly on T side, how have you felt about his performance so far?

I think he’s a really strong player, he surprised me a bit when he came into the team and we practiced with him. His understanding is pretty good, his aim is pretty good, and sometimes he is also coming up with some ideas on what we can do, pistol rounds and stuff like that, things that help an in-game leader and coach. I think that’s really important as a player.

What were the expectations for the RMR, bearing in mind you arrived with a stand-in?

Of course if we were playing with k0nfig I think we would expect to go through, now it’s more that we know we can go through but if we are maybe a little unlucky with our matchups and we’re not hitting our game, then we are probably not going to go through.

Yeah the expectations are much lower, but we are still aiming to do it.

Talking more generally about Astralis in recent months, towards the end of last season there was a lot of progress, you had good results at Pinnacle Cup Championship, Roobet Cup and IEM Cologne, and climbed up to No. 3 in the world.

It feels like that progression has stumbled a little bit coming out of the player break, how has it felt to you?

It’s tough to say. I could feel that we started to play better in the later part of last season, we tried to bring it with us and we talked about keeping the momentum going for this season. We played okay at BLAST in the group stage, didn’t really play that good afterwards in the gauntlet system, so yeah it has been pretty tough, especially Pro League right?

We don’t feel like we have been showing up the way we should, so to be honest it has been pretty devastating, but now we have to focus on this tournament and qualifying for Rio.

Could you put your finger on what happened? Was it the player break coming at a bad time or something else?

It’s so tough to say, you can’t point your finger at something and say it’s because of that one thing. We tried to change some stuff around and maybe our mindset could be a little bit like “we lost on this map, let’s try something else,” instead of saying “that was one bad game, let’s do it a little bit different next time.”

I think we have had been pretty fast at losing confidence on maps, every time we lose, doesn’t matter if we lose to a 'bad team' or a 'good team', we just lost confidence so quickly on our maps, which felt pretty sad. I think we need to change our mindset a bit about those things.

I know there isn’t much you can tell me about the k0nfig and device rumours flying around at the moment, but does it affect you coming into a tournament with so much furor surrounding the team?

No, I don’t really think so because we all want to go to the Major and it means a lot to us. This is a really important tournament, and we all want to give everything we have.

You never know what is going to happen in the future, and that includes everyone on the team, also me. Our results haven’t been that great, and I understand that the organisation sometimes wants to try something different, you gotta respect it and try to do your best to keep your spot on the team.

I feel that it’s good to have open and honest conversations about stuff as well, so it’s not like everybody knows something but this guy doesn’t, I don’t think that’s good.

It’s good as it is now, where the coach and the organisation are making the hard changes and the players aren’t involved. I think that’s good.