svyat: "ICY's really good individually but makes a lot of mistakes"

AMKAL's coach believes in his young AWPer's potential, but the Copenhagen Major may have come too soon.

AMKAL defeated NIP, Falcons, and 9 Pandas at the RMR but struggled to show any of the same form at the Major, bowing out of Copenhagen with a 0-3 record.

Elimination was confirmed after a tight 2-1 loss to The MongolZ, and it was "individual mistakes" that cost the Russian side according to coach Svyatoslav "⁠svyat⁠" Dovbakh.

It was the 29 year-old's second Major, having appeared with DreamEaters at StarLadder Berlin in 2019, but his first as a coach after joining AMKAL just before the RMR.

With plenty to work on, and a diamond in the rough with AWPer Kaisar "⁠ICY⁠" Faiznurov, svyat is confident of reaching more Majors: "'I'm sure the team can reach Majors, every Major, but we need to prove ourselves we can play the Major like a good team."

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Give me your initial reaction, bowing out of the Major.

We just made a lot of mistakes, individual mistakes especially. We knew how TheMongolz team would play against us, it's not like they surprised us, but we had a lot of mistakes individually.

What do you think about the veto? It seems like you're a team that likes to be on your comfort maps even if they are opponents' strong maps too.

We have good picks. Map veto was good for us. It's not like we played bad maps, we have confidence in Overpass, Nuke, Mirage, and Inferno so these maps are good for us and we were pretty confident after the map veto. But like I said before, a lot of individual mistakes.

Going back to the RMR, and the upsets you could take there, what was the difference here?

The main difference is that we have no pressure in the Major. We had pressure at the Major, but not as much as at the RMR. Maybe we had more luck at the RMR, we had fewer individual mistakes. I guess we should play a lot better but something went wrong.

To be more positive, what's next for your team? What are you going to do to make sure you'll be at more of these events?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the team can reach Majors, every Major, but we need to prove ourselves we can play the Major like a good team. We just need a little bit more time than we had before, we are still a new team. We have lots of experienced players who played a lot of LANs and Majors before. So yes, you can see us in the next Major and maybe some other big LANs, but not now.

One thing on ICY, very young AWPer, what potential do you see going forward even if it wasn't his best showing here?

ICY is our biggest talent at the moment, he has a lot of potential. He has a very cold head, cold mind, he keeps calm in hard situations. He's really good individually but makes a lot of mistakes that cost our team rounds. I guess we just need to work with him together, me and him, to improve him because he is not ready to play at big events at the moment. But he really has good potential. I'm sure he'll be ready in half a year or so.

Like you said, you are a new team—

Yeah, I started playing with the guys in November, and came to them in January before the RMR. We had not so much time, but I'm sure we will use our next months and time before the next Major as well as we can.