NiKo: "It's just so unacceptable to drop the ball in such a crucial moment from a team like ours"

"There are a lot of reasons why we crumbled," the Bosnian superstar added.

Falcons came into the BLAST.tv Austin Major Stage 2 as the favorites to go through, and were also one of the teams with the biggest title chances.

That was far from what happened, though, as the star-studded roster collected only one victory — a close-fought win over OG, before being eliminated by MIBR in another nail-biting series.

The squad, which came closest to knocking Vitality off their perch across the season, thus ends the first part of the year with a massive disapointment, and Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač couldn't hide his frustration when speaking to HLTV after the loss.

"I could never really imagine that we would have been in this situation considering how we performed before this and the preparation that we have put in," he said.

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Commiserations on the loss. How do you feel after such a tough defeat?

Obviously, very disappointed and frustrated. It was a tough game, and losing this 5vs3 on a match point is just heartbreaking. It's just so unacceptable to drop the ball on such a crucial moment from a team like ours. A lot of things are going through my mind. I could never really imagine that we would have been in this situation considering how we performed before this and the preparation that we have put in. Just very sad and frustrated.

What do you think went wrong here? Because as you said, you had a great season up to this point, and since m0NESY joined, it was even better. What changed here?

I'm not sure. I think there are a lot of reasons why we crumbled. For some reason, our individual level was not as it was in the past couple of events, and then our pistol win rate percentage was also pretty bad at this event. It was really hard for us to gain momentum in any of the games that we have played.

We were under pressure every game trying to fight back almost constantly, and then it was just building up all the time. I cannot really pinpoint one thing why we showed such a bad level in this stage, it's just a mix of a lot of things.

You had a really good season up to this point. Does this result sort of cancel a lot of the good work that you have done so far, or do you take it as a blip in the road before going again?

When you have such a performance at the Major, it's always going to affect everything. We had a really unacceptable result here at the Major. It was nowhere near what we expected, so obviously it's just kind of hard to say that we had okay results when we underperformed like this in the most important event of the season.

I would say it's definitely a disappointing season at least for myself, because this is what we have practiced for the whole season. Ever since we started, we didn't really set too many goals for us to perform at the previous events, our highest priority was this one. It's just a shame that we have had such a result here after everything we have done.