guerri: "it was a really good series against Heroic again, and I think it was better than the Major"

The Brazilian coach talked about their last match against HEROIC and their plans ahead of the Major.

FURIA kicked off IEM Rio 2023 in great form with victories over fnatic and FaZe to secure a spot in the playoffs of their home event. They were on a quest to redeem their loss to HEROIC in the same arena at last year's Major, being matched against the Danes in the first round of playoffs. The Brazilians, however, crumbled on the last two maps and gave away a 1-0 series lead after a victory on Inferno in a similar way to their previous encounter.

Nicholas "⁠guerri⁠" Nogueira sat down with HLTV after his team's heartbreaking loss in front of an adoring home crowd to speak about his team's elimination match, Kaike "⁠KSCERATO⁠" Cerato's recent form, and their upcoming trip to Europe for the Paris Major.

What was the reaction from the team after the loss yesterday?

Each one has their style and their way to deal with loss. Some of the guys turn up the vibe really fast and others take a little longer, but it's part of the job and part of the life we chose. I think, overall we had the right mindset coming here of fighting until the end, drop every single [bit of] blood you have in your veins and it was a really good series against Heroic again, and I think it was better than the Major.

I wanted to talk a bit more specifically about the game...you won the first map on Inferno and went into the second map, and saffee told me that you felt really confident about it going into the game. Heroic started really well and then went on to close the game, what went wrong?

Every time we have a tough time at the beginning of the half, sometimes we have trouble finding the right pace and in my opinion, that's what happened. We had a shake after playing in the pistol round, we force buy, and we have the round in our hands to close it out and break their economy. I think it was three or four rounds that we had really close rounds that could have gone either side. I was trying to use all the timeouts to calm them down and for them to understand that the round had already passed and that we need to focus on the next one.

After that we started to come back and we lost that 3v1 against cadiaN that broke us again and broke our confidence. I think they played really well individually on Mirage, they played really well with really good reads, and they are dynamic like us, but as I said before the beginning of the game was really tough for us. When we had money on the CT side, they popped B and we lost that round, we retake A and they won with a force buy. Against this kind of team, we can't lose these rounds. It's our fault, but they used our mistakes really well.

What were the conversations like going into the last map after the Mirage loss?

We knew it would be like a veto map for them and a good map for us, they are not really a heavy Ancient team, but we know that they know how to play it. We were really confident because we had a really good conversation after the loss against Cloud9, where we had a bad T side and a good CT side. Yesterday we talked about Ancient, we knew that it would be the third map, and we talked about the T side and the talk was really good because at the beginning of the half, we were winning 8-1.

Again, they won some really close rounds and broke the economy. In a way, we could have closed 11-4, it think it was 9-4 at one point, and they played really well and have good individuals. They wrecked us in some rounds and that CT [side] we took too long to find the right pace, we gave them a lot of space and they were using that. They were playing fast and that caught us off guard a few times. Other rounds we lost ourselves, and in others, they were better individually, just 1v1s, and in Counter-Strike you can have the best strategies, but if you don't shoot in the head you lose.

Speaking of individuals and shooting people, KSCERATO. Is he the best rifler in the world right now?

He's insane, bro. He's one of the best and really calm, knows what to do, and has good communication. He understands the game and his position and the rotations. He's an amazing guy and really easygoing, he's perfect. He's my child [laughs].

You have a couple of weeks until the Major. What are your plans going into it? Do you have a boot camp planned?

We are going to rest for two days and then we come back to boot camp, but we'll do it a bit here and a little bit in Europe. Let's go to Paris, we want the title and we want to do everything we learnt in the past weeks to really make it happen.