karrigan: "Beating Bad News Eagles now is slaying our demons"

The Kosovar squad weren't able to upset FaZe's Major campaign this time around.

FaZe had a disastrous start to their BLAST.tv Paris Major Legends stage campaign, dropping back-to-back best-on-ones to HEROIC and, shockingly, Into the Breach to end up on the brink of elimination at the end of day one.

The European combine bounced back on day two with a best-of-three victory over 9INE, but were then matched against a familiar demon: Bad News Eagles.

Flatron "⁠juanflatroo⁠" Halimi's side has twice played spoiler to FaZe, once at the IEM Rio Major in the 1-2 round to eliminate Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen's side from contention, and again at the BLAST.tv Paris Major Europe RMR, ultimately leading to FaZe getting cast down to the Last Chance Qualifier, where they only just managed to scrape through to make the Major.

The Kosovars couldn't replicate that effort this time around despite having FaZe on the ropes mid-series, with the European side prevailing in overtime on Mirage before winning Inferno to close out the series and advance to the 2-2 round of matches.

After the game, HLTV spoke to karrigan for his thoughts on the match and FaZe's struggles in Paris, and asked him about what he said immediately after the win when he told his teammates that the last time they beat BNE at a Major, they won it (at PGL Antwerp 2022).

If you're unable to view the SoundCloud embed above, you find the audio version of this interview here.

Congratulations, you won over BNE, a team that has given you a bunch of trouble. Just tell me how that feels and about that matchup as a whole for you.

Yeah of course we're meeting BNE in a 1-2 game. They're super good, their playstyle is really clashing with our playstyle; we play chaotic CS as they do, but they do it on another level than we do.

Overall, a really tough match, but I'm proud of the boys because on the first map, we were not awake.We were not ping-ponging, against them the communication needs to be on point and that has been our main issue the whole tournament. Thank god we woke up for the second and third map.

I heard after the first map and you went outside, you were pretty loud with the guys. Can you give me some insight into what you were telling them at that point?

There was obviously some frustration from everyone, the way we are playing, the way we are getting wrecked, dying one-by-one, the trading. I think we had maybe 5% trading that map. There's just sometimes when the communication is not on point, the initiative is not there, the way we move is bad.

Obviously we are looking at me in the end to blame for a bad T side, but I felt really frustrated with the way we were handling ourselves and communicating and not realizing we need to be on point from round one, and they just steamrolled us on their CT side. Overpass has been a really map for us this year, and today we were just gone.

It was something rain also said at the end of the first stage, that communication issues were prevalent. That's still happening here then?

We had a team talk yesterday after the 0-2 game. We talked a lot about communication, rewatched both Inferno games, and just tried to understand. The main problem for us is that somebody says something and one guy doesn't realize what's being said, or doesn't fill in the gap for what is needed in the round. People are talking but people don't understand each other, so we can't get an overall picture of whatever is happening in the round.

But against 9INE, we had really good, clean communication, pushing, understanding, and moving well as a team. Today I think it was a mix of everything, and also obviously BNE made us very uncomfortable during the whole series.

They're a team that have made you uncomfortable previously at Majors too. I heard that after you won, you got up and said that every time you've beat them at a Major, you've won the Major [laughs].

[smiling] Yeah, I mean I beat them in Antwerp 16-4, so obviously I'm just trying to pump up the guys and believe we can do it now. Obviously, beating them now is slaying our demons because that has been a team that has really been annoying for us. It's just some banter and trying to make the guys laugh, that we actually can do it now. Important game tomorrow, and step-by-step, see if we can go the whole way.

I do quickly want to go back to the ITB loss too, outside of the communication issues what went wrong there?

Everything went wrong there. We just got picked off, like CRUC1AL just kept peeking, and some of the things we talked about is that when we get picked off, people need to find solutions. Why are they dying in specific areas of the map? Do we need an AWP? Do we need to flash more?

Because I need to end in a situation where we have a late-round as well to call, if we don't have a flash I'm fine with that, but we need to not die in our defaults. That's something we talked about, and I think we improved a lot of that the day after. Today is a different game, they're a different team, so obviously we didn't die so much in our default, but more went into stacks and lost some stupid rounds on CT side.