sdy on playoff challenges: "The scariest one is probably FURIA"

After making it to the quarter-finals, NAVI set their sights on the next target, the hometown heroes of FURIA.

After the tournament saw two of the biggest favorites in FaZe and Vitality go by the wayside, all eyes were on Natus Vincere as the next biggest name still yet to make it to the playoffs. But unlike their counterparts, the Ukrainian side survived the tough road in what has been an upset-filled IEM Rio Major, beating Bad News Eagles and BIG in consecutive elimination series to clinch a spot in the Jeunesse arena.

Viktor "⁠sdy⁠" Orudzhev spoke to HLTV.org following his team's laborious road to the bracket stage, discussing their latest win against BIG, in which NAVI came back from a 3-9 deficit on Mirage and dominated the offensive half on Dust2 after a sub-par CT side performance.

The Ukrainian also spoke about their next target, FURIA, whom NAVI will face in the quarter-finals, and admitted that playing against the passionate Brazilian crowd will be a challenge.

"The scariest one is probably FURIA, and we're gonna play them. It's even hard to play in front of this crowd, so I cannot imagine 15 thousand people screaming for FURIA every second," sdy said.

"I think we need to have a good start, because when FURIA starts snowballing, rolling, it's hard to stop them."

Read the full interview below:

Can you tell me about your tough road to the playoffs and how it went inside the team, finally making sure you make it to the playoffs against BIG.

First of all, it was hard work and it feels really good after you achieve the things that you work on. We had a kinda long bootcamp, almost two weeks, and we made a lot of changes. You can see that our game is better than it was before this bootcamp, for sure.

B1ad3 was talking yesterday about you still needing some tournament experience and making sure that you are up to par with what you learned at the bootcamp. How satisfied are you with the form you've shown so far?

Individually, I can say that I'm satisfied overall with my performance in this stage. Only the last map on Dust2, I felt a bit off. But talking about the team overall, it's like we're still missing some pieces that we need to put together, but we're doing it better time by time.

Tell me about the first map against BIG and the slow start. What did you to do to come back from that 9-3 start? What did B1ad3 say in that timeout, from where you were back on track?

B1ad3 was saying "calm down, guys, everything is okay, just focus on the things that we need to do, we will win our rounds, there is no problem, just focus on the game." He was cheering us up and that's what we needed, actually. We just moved out of these bad feelings and things that are going on in your head when you are losing like that at the start of the game, and we made the comeback.

It's been a very CT-sided Major and you have struggled on the T side even more so than some other teams. You only got seven rounds on that CT side on Dust2 but then dominated - how confident were you after switching over with just seven rounds?

To be honest, I think our Dust2 T side is the strongest side of all maps, probably.

Who do you see as your biggest challenges in the playoffs?

The scariest one is probably FURIA, and we're gonna play them. It's even hard to play in front of this crowd, so I cannot imagine 15 thousand people screaming for FURIA every second, and they're just running. I don't know, we will see (laughs). So FURIA.

You haven't really experienced that, playing against the crowd, right?

Yeah, we didn't play any Brazilian team here, so we'll still going to experience it.

What do you think will be the key to beat FURIA?

I think we need to have a good start, first of all, because when FURIA starts snowballing, rolling, it's hard to stop them. We need to stop them in the beginning and counter every aggressive play that they have, and it will be fine, I think.

What about other than FURIA, do you see Cloud9 as a big threat after your previous loss to them, or do other teams also have a chance?

We lost to ourselves on that map. We had a huge lead and it feels like we just couldn't finish it because of our mistakes. But yeah, every team at this point is pretty strong. I cannot pick one.