jL jokes: "It's going to be a sad thing removing one of my idols from the lower bracket"

Justinas "⁠jL⁠" Lekavicius was in a playful mood about facing FaZe in the lower bracket.

Natus Vincere's first Big Event as an international side has had its ups and downs. A loss to MOUZ on day one was not as competitive as expected, and a loss on Inferno to OG also threatened to dampen spirits.

Not jL's, however, as he was in as good a mood as ever while he gave us a few words after Natus Vincere embarked on their lower bracket run with a victory over the squad led by Nemanja "⁠nexa⁠" Isaković.

2-1 win against OG. Tell me how you're feeling so far.

I'm feeling good. If you scratch the second map, Inferno, it's a comfortable and nice win. But if you count the second one, we have to work on our Inferno B site on CT for sure. It was usually good, we just didn't trust the things that we had, and we skipped some protocols that we used to do. So, that's why it was kind of rough on B for us on CT side.

How are you finding playing in NAVI. Obviously a huge organization, do you feel how big it is to play there?

No [laughs]. I mean, of course, it's big from the fans' perspective. Anything you do, you're going to be supported. There's a lot of messages and kind words for every game. Of course there's a lot of bad words if you lose, and everyone treats themself as family so if we lose NAVI fans will say 'we lost' and not 'you lost', so that's kind of nice. And yeah, about the tier one scene I don't know, it's just normal games.

What about your role in the team? A bit of an anchor, maybe a more supportive element, how are you finding that?

It's completely fine. I'm not really supportive, I don't know where you got that from because I'm never supportive. On T side I'm usually the aggressive lurker so I'm getting supported. And on CT side, I anchor only a few sites.

I think one of them is Ancient because Aleksib was really confident in B Cave so I let him play there and chose B, and I'm doing quite a good job in there. Nuke, A site, I'm the anchor, but I also chose that role because I just wanted iM to be the star player on Door. Aleksib felt super confident Outside and b1t chose Ramp. Well, he prefers Ramp, and I took the hit there and chose Inner, because I'm not experienced on the map and I know that people will do a better job than me in those positions.

What about the other part of your role, as kind of the emotional guy in the team, keeping everyone's mood high. There's a lot of jokes about you stopping s1mple being toxic, things like that, is there an element of truth to any of that?

Of course, yes. Sometimes it's a hard task to keep the mood up because sometimes you have a bad day and a lot of things are going wrong. Just you hyping them up isn't going to change that. It's up to each and every individual to realise that 'Woah, we have a bad mood, we should pump it up.' I am always going to do that role, but sometimes I am also low on energy and it's kind of hard to pump the mood up.

What's B1ad3 like as a coach? He's got a big reputation, do you feel his presence in all these timeouts? What's it like being under him?

Everything about B1ad3 is straight to the job. No emotions, just cold-blooded 'we have to do this and this, we didn't do this and that, this could work, and this doesn't.' It's just about the gameplay, he's just a cold-blooded strategist.

Moving on in the lower bracket, how confident are you of running the gauntlet?

Who do we have? FaZe or G2?

It's FaZe, FaZe lost.

Oh. It's going to be a sad thing removing one of my idols from the lower bracket, but it is what it is [laughs]. But yeah, I feel confident against them. They are a really, really, really strong team of individuals. If our game doesn't go, we're going to get stomped 16-5, 16-5. So we have to be on our toes, always ready, always focused, confident and take it one game at a time.

Date	Matches
IEM Cologne 2023
01/08/2023	FaZe 12:30 Natus Vincere	Match