Aleksib: "We showed that we are capable again"

NAVI's captain spoke candidly about the grand final in a post-match interview with BanKs.

Natus Vincere couldn't close out their season on a high note as they suffered a 1-3 loss to Spirit in the grand final of BLAST Premier Spring Final, managing a one-sided win on Mirage but otherwise getting outcalled and outgunned in the moments that mattered across losses on Ancient, Dust2, and Nuke.

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Spirit beat NAVI to win BLAST Premier Spring Final

The team around Aleksi "⁠Aleksib⁠" Virolainen achieved glory when they won PGL Major Copenhagen, but stumbled at ESL Pro League and IEM Dallas with failures to replicate the same level of success.

A return to the stage in London saw them move past Virtus.pro to challenge IEM Katowice champions Spirit for the title, but it was Leonid "⁠chopper⁠" Vishnyakov's side who came out on top after some excellent calling to lift their second trophy.

After the loss, a dejected Aleksib spoke to James "⁠BanKs⁠" Banks on broadcast in a post-match interview to share his thoughts on the game. The Finnish tactician went into detail about the matchup, discussing just how it felt to play Spirit and his feelings on how Natus Vincere struggled to get going in the series.

James "⁠BanKs⁠" Banks: NAVI find themselves taking the silver medal this time around, and it was a tough final for you as I can imagine. I want to start with looking at the opening two maps and what you felt went wrong, even just the first one, where you go down so hard and we didn't see the NAVI we've seen so far in this tournament where you can pick yourselves back up. Just talk me through it.

First of all, I'm going to start with the veto. I think it was pretty unfortunate they're banning Inferno from us. We needed to ban Vertigo and it's not their strongest map right now.

They had our number on Ancient the previous time and we also practiced against them, we felt like we know what to do, but their strong side is the T side for sure and once they get the ball rolling and get the economy, it kind of felt hopeless at times, like we're trying to force the issue when we shouldn't, and they were completely controlling the T side. Then we went to the driver's seat on the T side as well, but it was already too late, we gave them too many rounds on their own map.

Going into map number two, it felt like we still weren't there. We brought ourselves back on Mirage, which was already too late, but they played really well so what can you do.

And your Dust2, is this more you guys giving out too much, maybe you mentally weren't there? I was very confident looking at this, like Dust2 has been so sharp for you, you've been picking it the whole time and this was like, 'Okay, we're going to be at 1-1.'

[After a long pause] It felt like we didn't have the same confidence because of going 0-1, it kind of felt like we got crushed going into Dust2, starting slow, losing first gun round, pistol, it was a tough battle.

In the end we still managed to claw our way back on the T side, getting five rounds which seemed pretty good. We get the game to 9-9, and I don't know, I think we just got outplayed after.

I'm yet to review the rounds, but it just felt like we were just collapsing and suddenly it's a 5vs1 or something like this. We didn't manage to play our own CS at the end of the CT side, I'm happy with how we managed to fight on that map, but it still wasn't enough. Then we showed ourselves on Mirage, but going into Nuke, again, just a poor CT side to be honest.

What do you think it is about Spirit that makes it so hard for you guys?

Their lurk players can also shine in terms of getting openings when they shouldn't, and that really enables your whole team because if you have a pack going somewhere, like if you saw on Nuke one round, zont1x snuck through the smoke towards Main and killed two of us, it's just game over. If we let the one player who is controlling Lobby make moves like this, we don't know where the pack is. It's impossible to play.

At the same time, in the first gun round we also kind of threw, they managed to catch us off-guard in Inner, I should have been there. It just felt like they had our number when it mattered. As I told you, sometimes their side players are shining and letting the others do whatever they want on the map. Sometimes we do it as well, but not against them it seems.

Lastly, your season or the half of the season we've played so far. You lifted the Major trophy, amazing, a second place here. How would you sum it up? I don't want to be too much on the negatives, try and see back, think of the whole year for me.

Obviously right now it sucks but to be fair, NAVI started to build something internationally and we managed to win the Major trophy, which was a huge thing for NAVI. After that we kind of lost ourselves, but here we showed that we are capable again. Even though we lost in the final, managed to win one map, they were just simply the better team.

We're not the number-one team at the moment but we are somewhere among the best teams, and that's a really good sign for NAVI's international squad as well. Because if we just lifted the Major trophy and just vanished, it wouldn't feel as good, but now we brought ourselves back and we will have more confidence starting the next season. But at the end of the day, at least we did something correctly. The previous four or five years of my career, I hadn't lifted a trophy, so there must be some positives as well.