B1ad3: "Even if we remove somebody, it won't be because he let us down"

The Ukrainian coach praised his players for their late-season effort, while lamenting a slow start earlier in the year.

Natus Vincere are out of the BLAST.tv Austin Major after an 0-2 loss to Vitality. A tough Mirage was followed by a barn-burner on Nuke, which went all the way to the final round of regulation, shattering Aleksi "⁠Aleksib⁠" Virolainen and his men's dreams of advancing to the quarter-finals.

"I saw the win, already," Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy told HLTV in the mixed zone after the match. "I didn't expect to lose the anti-eco.

"We had good plans of what to do on T side and, as soon as we started the comeback and they had an eco, I already had a vision of how we could do this, this, this, and beat them."

After speaking about the lost quarter-final, NAVI's skipper talked about his thoughts going into the break, and the possibility of off-season changes.

You can listen to the interview, here.

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I'll go back to our media day interview, when you said that if you feel like you have a 1 in 10 chance to beat Vitality, that then you can keep the hope alive. Coming into this match, did you believe that there was this chance?

Yeah, yeah. I believed a lot, but I believed more on Nuke than on Mirage. On Mirage, at some point, we started to lose control of the situation, which is very important not to do. It's crucial to know, at least approximately, what will be the next ten seconds, and we weren't trying to do this. We weren't even trying to reach this information, which means that we were checked out.

We were not trying to resist to the danger that would happen in 15 seconds. On the stage, it's important to make these moves, to risk, to play more with the odds, and at that point, I thought, 'Okay, it's hard to win with this, because we need something to beat Vitality.'

They're a better lineup, better players, and we need something. Basically, they've lost zero best-of-threes; other teams couldn't beat them. If we wanted to beat them, we needed to have something. Like, I don't know, strong discipline, or very good justified risk, where they couldn't control us, and so on.

But on Nuke, I thought we had a chance to win and then it would be Inferno. So yeah, there was a chance. We lost an anti-eco, the where they pushed Lobby, we should have won that eco because we didn't do it correctly. We knew they were going to push, and we should have changed direction to Ramp, but we go confused and went A, but the plan was to go Ramp. That was a crucial round, but when you play Vitality, some miracle can happen. That amazing last round saved them from OT.

Once you got going on the T side, it really seemed like you could bring it back. It was very, very close. Did you start to believe that it would happen?

Yeah, yeah. I saw the win, already. I didn't expect to lose the anti-eco. We had good plans of what to do on T side and, as soon as we started the comeback and they had an eco, I already had a vision of how we could do this, this, this, and beat them, but then that round gave a handicap, when they lost the anti-eco. After that, we had a kind of clear idea about how we're going to start, mid-round, and finish. When you have this clear vision it's very easy to play, so I was believing, yeah.

I'll return to the media day conversation, and you said that when this tournament ends it would be time to start having talks and making decisions. Of course, it's right after the game now, and you'll have those talks with the team and the management, but what can we expect from NAVI in this coming off-season?

I can't say that we have some obvious weakness, like a player who is spoiling everything and we can't win because of him. It's hard to make a decision because there's no obvious reason, right? I think we all play good at some point, and we all make mistakes at some point, so we're all kind of equal.

Even if we remove somebody, it won't be something like, 'This guy sucks and he let us down.' They all played good, and I appreciate the effort, it was a very nice try, and the guys worked really hard before the bootcamp, in the bootcamp, and during the tournament everybody wanted to show their best.

We'll think, we'll see how it goes, but as I said in that interview, if we want to do something next season we need to sit down and look at our options for next season, and what we can do. Should we do a change? If we do that change, will we be better? Now? Or later? So yeah, we need to go through it, but we will think about it for sure. We'll start now, thinking about what are our plans for next season.

There's often the talk about NAVI not having a star player. Do you think you need that star power?

I don't think there are a lot of star players nowdays, they're all in other teams, like NiKo, m0NESY, ZywOo, and donk. So basically, if you speak about star players, it's better to hunt some new guy that could pop up in one year, I don't know.

Other than this, we knew that our formula can work without [a star]. We tried it before already, so we're not specifically looking for a star player in our squad to be better. It's all about pieces, so we'll see the chances, the pieces for next season, what we're lacking, what we're needing, and so on.

How do you see the NAVI pipeline, with the NAVI Jr. team?

It's possible. Why not? It depends. It always depends on the market. We sit down, see the weakness, and take five candidates, for example. We check the vision, how it can work in the beginning, during the season, at the end of the season, what we're aiming for... Because sometimes you're going to rebuild and expect something in one year, so we'll see, we'll see...

No trophies, it's been kind of a tough season. You say nobody let you down, but maybe also nobody stepped up enough? Because it's kind of a disappointment to go from being such a strong team to not getting one trophy. Although it's also kind of Vitality's fault for winning all of them, right? But what do you make of not getting any trophies in the first half of the year?

This is obviously a full disappointment, and I think that sometimes you can go in this, let's say slump, when you're winning and being Team of the Year. You can lose this kind of fire, and motivation, when you're working hard throughout the season to win at least something. We were a little bit sleepy, like in sleeping mode, waiting to wake up. If you start the season with this shape, it would have been different. This squad could win some trophies if we started with the same effort at the beginning of the season.

Obviously, other teams kind of outplayed us, or not outplayed us, but outran us, because MOUZ was still in finals — I don't know if they won something —, but they were constantly in the finals. Falcons bought one or two players, and they kind of also outran us because of this. Spirit was always kind of there, so the competitive level was so high that we went from, like I spoke with you, we went from beating them in close matches in the previous season, to losing these close matches.

If you noticed, in this Major, we actually won all of these close matches. Like it was by a hair versus 3DMAX. They could win 2-0 easily that day, it was one round where they threw an HE and Mihai [iM] was 1 HP and we won the round. Then we beat G2, also on the edge, so you see, this is how high and strong the competitive level is now.

Next season, it won't matter which lineup it'll be, this will also matter a lot. All teams are very strong nowdays, you don't see so many teams in playoffs, specifically for this reason. Like Astralis, Falcons, G2...