B1ad3: "donk has a great future, but I think he needs to fix his behavior"

B1ad3 discusses frustrations with NAVI's "basic mistakes," loss to Spirit, donk's potential and shouting antics, and w0nderful's improvement.

NAVI have gotten off to a shaky start at IEM Katowice but have lived through the second day of the group stage.

The opening game had the team around Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy fall on the receiving end of Danil "⁠donk⁠" Kryshkovets and Dmitry "⁠sh1ro⁠" Sokolov's wrath, before they came back on day two with a hard-fought win over Apeks that had the NAVI coach frustrated with "basic mistakes."

Date	Matches
IEM Katowice 2024
03/02/2024	Natus Vincere Finished 1:2 Spirit	Match
04/02/2024	Natus Vincere Finished 2:1 Apeks	Match

HLTV spoke with B1ad3 on the second day of the group stage to ask about those frustrations, NAVI's issues with individual form at the Katowice tournament, and Ihor "⁠w0nderful⁠" Zhdanov's development.

The 37-year-old shared why he thought a poor individual game cost them the match against Spirit, and he gave his opinion on donk's strengths and potential as well as his controversial shouting antics.

You can watch the full interview above or read the transcript below:

B1ad3, congratulations on outliving Apeks...

raises hands in celebration

... now you seem happy, but you looked pretty frustrated during that game at times, especially towards the end of the second map. Can you tell me about what happened there?

I think I was pretty frustrated during the whole match but with moments. Sometimes you do some strange and stupid thing, not something I expect to see and I'm pretty sure players also don't expect to see this. And it's just really frustrating, yeah. It's just mistakes, you know? On Anubis we were hurrying up where we could freeze for a little bit, if we have a smoke in our face, and not hurry up because people have an advantage... Basic things. We are not doing steps properly for advantageous situations.

Why do you think these mistakes were being made?

I think we never stop doing the mistakes. We're constantly doing reviews of every match, if we win or lose, doesn't matter. We always have mistakes. Always there. I think we're just day by day, step by step, trying to fix it, but for sure it takes time. The more officials we have the more knowledge we get, the more experience, the more conclusions we will have.

At this event I think we're also a little bit bad individually. The games that we were winning before we were on point in terms of individual performance for sure. That's also maybe the reason why we're not playing so good.

I wanted to ask about that, as well. We saw b1t in good form since the beginning of this lineup, and iM has been picking it up as well, but in Katowice so far that hasn't been the case. They had a rough start against Spirit and also on the first map here. What do you think that is down to?

It's a very interesting question. If I knew, I would know everything. I couldn't understand a lot of players. Imagine, sometimes we saw s1mple not playing well, right? And whenever we have a team talk, nobody can say why. It's all about how your brain works this day. Imagine you play bad, now you're overthinking, like, 'what happened?' It's always a unique situation for everyone I think. It's all about handling it, understanding it by yourself, scanning yourself to learn to have this knowledge. If somebody else tells you what went wrong with you, it's weird. I cannot get in his head.

Tell me about yesterday. Spirit had the upper hand on the two maps you lost.

I think individually we played really bad. Individually they were out-aiming us a lot of times in advantageous situations for us, in situations where we usually are making good trades and so on. I don't know why, I didn't see the POV of everyone because we needed to prepare this match, but if I review I will see what happened.

I think on Ancient one time we lost a molly, donk killed... Basically, yesterday, I think everything started from Ancient. I think that we lost so badly on Ancient affected us. We didn't have a lot of time to prepare for Mirage, we basically played our game. On Ancient I think we had a really good game plan on CT, and then the first two buy rounds we didn't stick to it. We already spoke about this, that it's very important because in MR12 it's very crucial to start really sharp, with good ideas in the first buy round, second buy round, to dictate the pace.

There's a lot of attention on donk and a lot of people were looking at this game specifically because it was considered his first big test on LAN against a top-five team. He's obviously an aggressive player, the one dictating the pace. How do you deal with him and how come it didn't work?

I think he's individually really good, mechanically speaking he's good. Not in terms of experience for sure, like decision-making. I think he's doing aggressive plays, impulsive decisions, and it works for him in CS2 really well because you can swing and always have an advantage, you're running and people are supporting you from behind, or somebody is running in front of you sometimes. That's for sure his main strength. He's running and aiming really, really sharp. I don't think it's hard to counter him. I think if he faces a really strong team who challenge him aim-wise, in that case the other guy with experience have more effective decision-making.

He has a great future, but I think the only thing he needs is to fix his behavior. Sometimes he's screaming really bad words at this age, and it's weird, very sad that nobody around can help him, to have good advice to say to him. They even praise him for doing this is, this is weird for me. I would really like to advise him not to be that kind of aggressive, screaming. It's different. When apEX is screaming, it's a different thing. He's screaming bad words and you see he means this, actually. It's a dangerous road, I think.

Apart from that series, though, you have been looking up as a team. Apart from this one, you've only lost two series to Vitality since the World Final. Do you feel like there has been a turning point for NAVI in these last few tournaments and that your form has improved?

We were planning to find really good form at the Major specifically, if we get there. In March we will have one more bootcamp, the third one with this lineup as far as I know, and in that case we will be much, much stronger. It's a really hard project for me because it is international and everyone is with a completely different background, completely different, and it's hard to implement a system like this.

We're trying, you see it works for some games, for some not, but it takes time for sure. When you go on the server and there are stressful situations, unknown for everyone in the team, you must react really fast, but it's impossible to react with effective synergy on the server. And we have the same issue now. Sometimes we're disconnected a little bit. It goes by analysis, conclusion, fixing mistakes.

I wanted to ask about an update on w0nderful. You can see that he has these peaks, we saw it on the first map against Apeks for example. How has he developed in the past few months?

I like it. I like it a lot, actually. I like how he's improving. I remember when he came and what knowledge he had, and I think he's understanding a lot of what we're trying to teach him. The dynamic is really, really good, but he still has a lack of experience and, because of this, decision-making sometimes. With this dynamic, he can be a really great player.