nawrot: "It feels good to beat G2 on their best map"

The Polish coach took some time to share his thoughts just minutes after his team's upset victory against G2.

9INE are one of the up-and-coming tier two teams competing at BLAST.tv Paris Major Europe RMR B that managed an upset in the first round of best-of-ones alongside the likes of Monte and Aurora. The Poles completed the feat against none other than the top-ranked team in the world, G2, and did so on one of the international squad's strongholds, Nuke.

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The team's coach, Piotr "⁠nawrot⁠" Nawrocki, took some time after the big best-of-one victory over Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen and company to chat about how the upset came about, as well as 9INE's rise in the online scene over the past few months and being back on LAN for the RMR tournament.

How did you make the call to go on Nuke against G2?

Nuke is one of our best maps, as well, we feel very confident on it and we're big fans of them, we watch them a lot, so we kind of knew what they were doing. We didn't expect them to play the same way they did before because I feel like they played most of the stuff that I had watched. Basically we just felt confident and we decided that if it's best-of-one, why not take them down on their best map? What can go wrong here?

I mean, a lot of things could go wrong! But it didn't! Is this a student becomes the master situation?

Kind of. In the past two or three months, like three months ago, we were struggling on Nuke. I watched a lot of G2 because they were on a sick win streak against FaZe, NAVI, so I took a lot of stuff from them. I twisted those things to fit our style, so yeah, it's kind of the situation you're talking about. It feels good to beat them on their best map. We were looking up to them, so it feels even better.

You guys have been smashing online, getting some really good results, winning qualifiers and getting spots to important events. So how is it here, playing on LAN, getting into the atmosphere and winning the first match against G2?

It was kind of a weird situation because we haven't been on LAN since like four years; me, KEi and Kylar for sure. Goofy maybe less, hades was recently with ENCE. So it was kind of a situation in which I didn't know how KEi and Kylar would feel, but I mean... If you saw KEi today he was buzzing, man. I felt like he was confident so it's nice for us to be on LAN because we're more hungry.

On the internet we lost that hunger, lately, we couldn't get going. We couldn't get hyped. When we're here the guys are screaming, they're hyped, so it's very important for us that we react this way. It started very well so we just go from there.

So what form did you come here in? You've been doing very well online, but it was more at the beginning of the year that you had your big push. It seems like now you've been a bit more up and down, but how did you feel coming into the event?

The issue was that at the beginning of the year we had a lot of stuff prepared, so it was natural for us that if those things worked we would be on the rise because it would be hard to counter us. People didn't know the way we play. Now when we played a lot of officials, it was much easier for teams to prepare. Let's say this last month, we felt like we were getting countered.

Coming here, we were boot camping before. The preparation was a little bit off, not the preparation, but the mood in practice and stuff was a bit off. As I said we didn't get hyped enough to compete in praccs and in official games. I believe that it will be much easier for us because we prepared some new stuff, we can use it here, it's working as I can see now, and it feels good. The stuff we worked on the last two weeks is working on LAN against a team like G2.

How did you feel against G2? Like they were prepared, or did they not prepare enough?

From what I saw from the coach perspective, which is not always biased, I would say that they did not prepare that much for us. We still use things that we were using before we played them and it worked. We caught them off-guard a lot so I don't think they prepared that much for us.

How big of a confidence boost is beating G2 on Nuke going into the next matches?

It just shows other teams that they have to respect that Nuke. They need to prepare for that for the next times because if they don't do that, they will just get beaten the way G2 did, getting caught off-guard. So they need to prepare for that. The confidence, as you can see the guys are smiling, they're very happy. Beating the No. 1 team in the world gives you a lot of confidence, it's obvious.

Poland hasn't had a [team] representative at a Major since 2018. How has the community support been for you guys?

It has been nothing but very nice because they're cheering for us. A lot of people are watching our games, we can feel the fans cheering for us. It's been great. Of course there are some people talking weird stuff, it's always like that, but the guys that are cheering for us are great. We can feel them and it helps a lot.