JT: "For Sonic to come back and put up numbers is pretty impressive"

Complexity's in-game leader spoke to HLTV about their nail-biting series against Astralis and his experience playing alongside long-time teammate Aran "⁠Sonic⁠" Groesbeek again.

For the second tournament in a row Complexity are playing with Sonic standing in for Håkon "⁠hallzerk⁠" Fjærli, who has had to sit out IEM Dallas and the BLAST Premier Spring Final due to visa issues.

With their former Extra Salt teammate, Johnny "⁠JT⁠" Theodosiou and company have now moved on to the quarter-finals with a hard-fought victory over Astralis, and set up a playoffs matchup against Imperial.

After the match, we spoke to the captain to get his thoughts on Sonic's performance in the Overpass decider against Astralis, in which the AWPer went 11-2 in duels against Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz and played a key role in closing the match, how it has been to have his old teammate back, and the upcoming quarter-final bout.

A crazy series against Astralis, 16-14s across the board, there were points where it looked like they would come back, you managed to close it out. Tell me your first impressions after this series and getting it over the line.

I think we played really well. We were trying to focus on ourselves in this game and just trying to keep it simple. I think we did a good job on that most of the time, but I think a lot of rounds we lost at the start, playing a little bit bad and not using each other to win the round. But overall I think we played a pretty good game and I'm happy we finally got a win. We've been waiting for one of those for a while now.

You've had some rough losses on Overpass dating back a few months, and here it was looking like Astralis were going to pull it back at the end. In the end you had a big pistol win to close it out - was it a big relief for it not to go to overtime and have to deal with all of that again?

Yeah, we've had some crazy Overpass games, especially against Imperial, which I think we're playing tomorrow. We also had a lot of chokes on Overpass at the beginning of the year, in January and February, so I'm happy we were able to close it out. I think we need to look back, especially at our CT side and the mistakes we made because there were a lot of rounds in my opinion that we should have won. I think maybe another day we would have lost that game and I'm just happy that we were able to pull through and keep ourselves on our toes.

Sonic had a great game, he was destroying device across the board, especially towards the end. Are you happy with how he's been performing?

Yeah, it's actually been really easy to play with Sonic. We're used to playing with him because most of us have played with him before. I'm really happy with his performance, I mean he's retired and hasn't been playing much CS in general since last year, so for him to come back and put up numbers and win us important rounds, especially today with the Deagle on Overpass, is pretty impressive. I'm really happy with how he's been performing.

Are you at all surprised that you've been this competitive with the stand-in situation?

I wouldn't say it's a surprise. I thought maybe we could play a little better, especially after the first few games it felt like we were playing pretty well together in the scrims, so I felt like we could have done a little better. Before this game we had only beaten EG, so I think in my opinion we should be winning more games. I'm happy we won today and I hope we can show tomorrow that we can keep winning more games even with Sonic, it doesn't have to be with hallzerk. We know how to play together and play pretty well in practice, so hopefully we can show that on the server.

I heard Sonic isn't super up-to-date with utility, is that true?

(laughs) Yeah, today he was messing up a lot of the strats, a lot of the nades. I think it's difficult for someone standing in to do a lot of strats, especially on a map like Ancient where he hasn't played that much on the new update. It's hard for him, especially under pressure, to remember, even if he has the strat book and that stuff, it can be a little confusing. We've been trying to make sure that, before we call the round, he knows what he's gonna do. But even then he can fuck it up, so hopefully when he does we are able to revive the round whatever way we can.

You will play against Imperial later in the quarter-finals, a historic matchup for you and you played them a couple of times pretty recently around the Major qualifiers. Tell me about expectations for the match and if we can expect another banger, which has been the case for you for a long time now.

If we play Overpass, it'll definitely be a banger. I'm hoping we play well tomorrow, usually against them it's just a crazy game, they play in general very confident, very aggressive, and even this tournament I watched the other games and they've been playing even more confident and more aggressive, and they've been winning big rounds in their first game. We just get into the game, make sure that we are sharp and shooting straight, and try and keep it simple against them.

Date	Matches
BLAST Premier Spring Final 2023
09/06/2023	Imperial 19:00 Complexity	Match