Snax: "Today we played pretty nice CS"

The Polish captain praised his team's performance in the elimination series against Astralis.

G2 have survived their second elimination series at IEM Cologne as they moved past Astralis, setting up a Group A lower bracket final against paiN on Tuesday.

The international team picked up comfortable wins on Dust2 and Ancient either side of a close loss on Mirage, where Astralis managed to rally back from 6-1 down. After the series, Janusz "⁠Snax⁠" Pogorzelski had nothing but praise for his team. "The way we played today, the comms and the energy on the team were pretty nice," he said.

Date	Matches
IEM Cologne 2024
13/08/2024	G2 15:45 paiN	Match

Looking ahead to Tuesday's match, Snax said that he expects his team to come out with the same intensity they showed against Spirit and Astralis. A victory will see Snax step onto the LANXESS arena stage for the first time since 2016, when he helped Virtus.pro reach the semi-finals.

Snax, a 2-1 victory. A weird series, I'd say. How are you feeling?

Why weird? I mean, it was a normal match. Sometimes you win with pretty good scores, sometimes you struggle in some of the halves. I'm pretty fine, obviously, with the score. I would say that today we played pretty nice CS. The only bad half, I would say, was CT Mirage. Maybe we focused too much on helping me on B instead of playing, like, maybe default. I'm not sure, I'm not going to leak everything. But I would say that the way we played today, the comms and the energy on the team were pretty nice.

You won 19 of the first 21 rounds of the series, but then it seemed that the intensity dropped on Mirage. Do you think the players lost a little bit of focus after that amazing start?

I wouldn't say so. On Dust2, we also had a good score and we kept it cool the entire T side. So I would say it was the same. We just lost the pistol, then some close rounds, and it was just hard to come back.

After Mirage, what was the team talk like? What did you discuss before the final map?

I said, 'Ancient is a pretty good map for us. Just forget about Mirage, it doesn't matter now. We still have one map to win' I just wanted to reset, I wanted all the guys to chill before Ancient. I said, like, 'I think I have a good plan against them on the T side. Even if we win the knife, we take T side.' We started on the T side and it looked pretty good. Also, insane plays from Mario [malbsMd] and everyone else on the team. It was nice to see.

Are there any valuable lessons that you can take from that Mirage game for the rest of the tournament?

Yes, but I'm not going to reveal every secret of my thinking, of my knowledge of CS, but for sure there are. We're going to talk after the match. Individually, I can say that maybe I wanted too much to help the guys today. On Dust2, I feel that we all played really well. On the second and third map, I felt like I wanted too much but my guys were trading so I was okay with that. We showed solid CS today overall.

You're now going to face the winner of paiN vs The MongolZ. What are your expectations for this match?

I think both teams are solid. We could see after the SAW game we had struggles and they beat us pretty convincingly in this BO3. I think if we just go with the same energy we had versus Spirit and Astralis, we can win it.

If you qualify for the playoffs, it will be your first time at the LANXESS arena since 2016. What would that mean for you?

Obviously, I always love to play in front of a crowd. It's always fun, you know, to listen to the people shout and cheer for the teams. It would be nice. I would rather play in Katowice. You know, for the Polish crowd. But it would be nice to be back on a big stage.