sAw: "The MongolZ have good firepower all around, and it can be hard to match"

HEROIC have been drawn against The MongolZ for a Major playoff spot in a rematch of the Thunderpick grand final.

Eetu "⁠sAw⁠" Saha is 11 days away from his one-year anniversary with HEROIC, and the squad are on the precipice of their biggest achievement yet.

They sit 2-0 after day one of the Shanghai Major, but The MongolZ — who beat them in Berlin's Thunderpick grand final — stand in their way.

Date	Matches
Perfect World Shanghai Major 2024
06/12/2024	The MongolZ 09:10 HEROIC	Match

"This will be a time for us to get the revenge," sAw tells HLTV. "Their style is, it's in a way simplistic, they rely on the firepower of their individuals.

"They have good firepower all around, and it can be hard to match at certain points [...] We need to be individually sharp, I think, in order to beat them."

He also spoke of HEROIC's troubled practice before the event, how scrim cancellations affected them, and creating "focus points" for the Major to avoid getting cocky.

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A 2-0 for the first day, the best-of-one crisis the other favorites are having averted. Satisfied with how things went today?

Yeah, I am satisfied with the best-of-ones we had today. When you go 2-0 that's the dream, and then you still get to work on the best-of-threes, and now we have three chances to make it to the playoffs. It's not gonna be easy because there have been some upsets already, and anyone can come up there, and you're playing top teams basically all the time, but three chances is a good thing. Hopefully, we're gonna make it.

Heading into these couple of matches, did you ever feel like you were out of control? Is there anything you have to address going into the best-of-threes, or has everything been working?

Most of the things have been working. In this Ancient against FaZe there was some stress at the start of the match in terms of communication, you could hear it in the tone of voices and stuff, but we were able to calm it down pretty fast, and after that, we got better control of the game. It has been pretty smooth, but there's always gonna be something.

We have also created focus points for this tournament also, what we're gonna focus on, and we need to evaluate a bit and keep focusing on those things on the best-of-threes. To continue the same and make sure we don't get overconfident. We can't get cocky, we can't get arrogant, we have to keep working for it. Now it was one good day with two best-of-ones, so we need to stay humble.

You're next matching up against The Mongolz, whose run has been tough and they made it through a couple of favorites on the way. I'm sure you've watched them decimate everyone throughout the first stage, is that a tough matchup for you guys?

Well, we played them in the Thunderpick final, in the best-of-five, and it was a pretty tough matchup. I think we had the chance to take it, to be honest, but in the end, especially on the last map, we couldn't get anything done. This will be a time for us to get revenge. Their style is, it's in a way simplistic, they rely on the firepower of their individuals. They have good firepower all-around, and it can be hard to match at certain points, but I wouldn't say their style is unpredictable.

It's more like they can read the game as well as they go, and we just need to adapt and play our own game to match it. We need to be individually sharp, I think, in order to beat them.

After you played the RMR, you stayed around in China to practice, which has created a long run-up to this Major. How did you structure your preparation coming into this? Was it different from usual, in any way special because of how long this run has been?

Of course, it's a lot different from all the other Majors. Last Major we even had some tournaments just before and we didn't have so much time to practice. If we wanted to do a bootcamp it wouldn't have been an option last time. Now we were kinda forced to do a bootcamp at this point (chuckles), because we're obviously staying in China, and I think in total we had like 10 days before the RMR and the Elimination Stage.

We used the time to bootcamp, we had like 7 days where we practiced mostly the teams from the Opening Stage. Then we also took some time off from the game because we can't realistically go 10 days just sitting in the pracc room and being in the server and then coming into officials. We tried to have a bootcamp, break it a bit, then come back into the game fresh, basically, and at least today it paid off, so it's nice to see.

Was it difficult to pick your training partners for that time? Obviously, you could end up meeting the teams from the Opening Stage, so was there a strategic component in that for you?

There was a strategy behind it, or how we wanted to do it. At this point it doesn't really matter, so I can also reveal that we tried to practice Opening Stage teams first, because then they would play the Opening Stage and we couldn't practice them anymore, and then after that we wanted to practice Chinese teams, mostly, so that we can still keep it fresh and we can play but not show too much stuff for the Elimination teams.

That backfired a bit because the Chinese teams started to cancel praccs against us, so during these last days we had to book some of the Eliminations teams, and we didn't get as much practice as we wanted to. Which is a bit unfortunate, but it is what it is (laughs).