nitr0: "G2 reminds me of old FaZe in a way"

Liquid's in-game leader talked to HLTV about his team's historic Overpass comeback against Vitality, the NAF clutch on Mirage, and facing off against G2 next at IEM Katowice.

Liquid advanced to the IEM Katowice semi-finals after a late-night thriller series against Vitality, in which the North American team performed a historic comeback on Overpass from 0-12 and closed the series in a chaotic Mirage decider.

HLTV talked to Nick "⁠nitr0⁠" Cannella in an interview after the intense match to find out what the team talked about just before they turned Overpass around, how they did it, and just how important that last-second clutch from Keith "⁠NAF⁠" Markovic was to close out the series on Mirage. The American also spoke about the upcoming semi-final match against G2 and outlined what he thinks makes Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen's squad a strong team at the moment.

We have to start with the Overpass comeback. It's only the second-ever time that someone has come back from Overpass from 12-0. How did you do it?

Honestly, I don't know. When we watched our games back yesterday, we had a really good understanding of how they play, and I even told the guys, I'm like, 'whenever we play these games I'm going to be saying everything that I see from demos and VOD. I'm gonna be calling everything what I think it is.' And a lot of this stuff was actually really true. They have certain tendencies as players that other players don't have on their team, where they're making noise in one spot, and maybe that player doesn't make noise when they're alone. In general, we had a really good read on them on their T side Overpass.

Their CT was very strong and I'm not really sure, maybe we were a bit too slow on our T side and were kinda obvious with our hits and stuff. It's just something we have to go and rewatch and figure out what we wanna do differently.

What about from a mentality side? I was listening to EliGE in another interview just now, and he was saying something along the lines of someone saying 'let's make this comeback happen,' I think it may have come from YEKINDAR. What happened in TeamSpeak when you guys were talking about this?

YEKINDAR basically was like, 'if we make this comeback, it's gonna be one of the greatest of all time.' And then daps was like, 'Jon, we've all come back from 13-2 halves, right?' And then Jon [EliGE] was like, 'Nah, I don't think I've ever came back from a 13-2 half.' And then we did it. And then we're like, 'that's cool,' if we did it for the first time ever. In all seriousness, I think this team has a lot of experience on the stage, obviously, and we are super resilient, especially in high-intensity stage matches. We soak in the energy and we feel the game more on stage, and it just feels a lot more fluid. I guess we just feel more comfortable on the stage in general.

Mirage at the end felt a bit chaotic from the outside. Did it feel like that in the game towards the end there?

Yeah, it was a battle in the beginning on the T side, but we pulled through with a pretty good half on T side, 9-6, so super happy with that T side. There was a lot of force battles going on, so I think for tomorrow I'm gonna have some good force and anti-ecos ready for us, rewatch and figure out what went wrong in those forcebuy rounds and what we should be doing better.

Tell me about that round NAF clutched in the last second. It was a round you were supposed to win from the start, but then Magisk caught you off-guard. How important do you think that round was to be able to close this out? From a mentality side, I'm sure it would have been a tilter of a round to lose.

It wasn't really a tilter. We understood the macro part, but he just made a good play, and Spinx crept up Cat and killed me. Aside from that, once the round ended, I didn't know who won. I was literally like, 'Who won?!' I looked at tab to look at which team won the round and I'm like, 'What?!' He shot his shoe and killed him. It was just one of those games where all the clutches go your way and it just feels like you can't lose. The whole game on Mirage specifically, we had really good reads, good comms, and everything felt fluid. We're super confident as team.

Tell me about G2 coming up in the semi-finals. You guys traded series with them at the World Final. How do you feel about your form now that you've beaten two big teams in a row and matching up against a team that's obviously in amazing form and having that massive streak?

I think it's just gonna come down to a lot of good prep and figuring out their tendencies as players. Right now, I feel like they're playing with such high confidence that it's kinda hard to read what they wanna do. They're playing very cohesive as a team right now, it kinda reminds of old FaZe in a way. They're not necessarily doing insane tactics, but the tactics that they do are really well executed. They have good trading, I think the highest trading right now, they have one of the best AWPers in the world, NiKo's popping off, jks is playing really well, especially this year, he's been popping off this year as an anchor and T side lurk, and HooXi is making some really good calls. I expect a really good game tomorrow and it's gonna be a lot of fun. We're super excited to play G2.