flashie: "Unfortunately, we are not ready to face these teams yet"

Liquid's new coach spoke about his team's struggles in Cologne, adapting to his new role, and what needs to be worked on moving forward.

Liquid bowed out of IEM Cologne in a deflated fashion, tallying eight rounds across two maps against FaZe in Group B's lower bracket.

It was the second time that Kamil "⁠siuhy⁠" Szkaradek's men fell to FaZe in Germany after losing to them in Stage 1, which Liquid still advanced from with wins over paiN and FlyQuest before getting sent to the lower bracket by MOUZ.

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FaZe annihilate Liquid to stay alive in Cologne

"Unfortunately, we are not ready to face these teams yet," Liquid's new coach, Viktor "⁠flashie⁠" Tamás Bea, tells HLTV after the team's elimination. "We need to go back to the drawing board and really go in-depth into how we can get there as fast as possible."

The early exit is the latest in a string of deflated results for Liquid, who ended the spring season without a win at the BLAST.tv Austin Major and lost to Sashi in the ESL Pro League Season 22 online qualifier after the break. That is something that they'll hope to turn around with flashie, who is working to implement a new team environment and culture after taking over skipper duties in the off-season.

"At the end of the day I just want a team that has a system that lets the players thrive. But to get there, I can only repeat myself, it just takes a lot of time," he says.

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A rough exit for you here. Tell me about it, what went wrong today?

Compared to the first game against FaZe, we were not as competitive today. We were not as sharp individually as we were in the first game, that helped us there a lot. Unfortunately, we are not ready to face these teams yet. We need to go back to the drawing board and really go in-depth into how we can get there as fast as possible.

Yesterday against MOUZ also wasn't as competitive as you probably would have hoped. What do you think you're missing to compete against these guys?

We need a lot of repetition and we need a lot of analysis of the games we played in Cologne to actually catch up to these teams. We started to implement a structure where we focus on the fundamentals and the protocols of our game, and we want to build on it in the future. This event was crucial to play these good teams, FaZe twice and MOUZ once, in order to have more material to analyze and more takeaways we can get from these games.

You're taking it as a learning, but how disappointing is it, especially considering there is a lot of pressure on the team given where it has found itself on the rankings heading closer and closer to the Major invites?

Yeah, for sure there is pressure, but at the same time creating a working team environment and culture takes time, and unfortunately this is not something people can speed up. If you speed it up, maybe you do more damage for the future and for the long-term goals. It's rough, definitely, but we will just keep working at it and not stop fighting.

You're coming in as a new coach, and you're coming into a finished lineup that has been together for a while. How has it been for you to come into this team and get them to adopt your vision?

It's a smooth process, in a sense, but it's also a process that takes a lot more time. I need more time to get to know my players a little more, what playstyle and what moves suit them the best, and I also need to implement all these changes at the same time.

Transitioning is smooth, but it takes time, I wouldn't say it can happen overnight, and we only had four and a half days of bootcamp. It was definitely a bit rushed, but we can just keep working. Now we can go home and review all these things and try to come up with solutions that will make us more competitive against these good teams.

Coming into this team, what have you identified as the biggest things that you can bring to them?

I think the most important thing that I can bring is a structure that lasts, and a foundation that we can build on. I think they have been lacking this in the past. This can go for out of the game approaches, but also in-game approaches. How do you build a round step by step, what do you base your timings off? It's a lot of complicated things, but at the end of the day I just want a team that has a system that lets the players thrive. But to get there, I can only repeat myself, it just takes a lot of time.

How has it been so far to work alongside siuhy?

It has been really fun to work with him. He has been nothing but open to all my ideas and all these things I have to implement. I would say the difference between our styles is that I'm coming from a more structured background and he's coming from a feeling-based and less structured gameplay, and I think we just need to mesh it. In the future we're gonna find a good balance of it.

You have some experience in coaching, but not from this kind of a level. You've had a lot of time to learn from B1ad3 in NAVI, and I'm sure that's where you find a lot of inspiration. Can you speak to that and what you think your identity as a coach is?

It's definitely a different feeling than being in the background and helping the team from the shadows. But it's nothing new to me, in terms of being in the spotlight, but at the same time working with these kinds of individuals, superstars who have won big things before, like Russ who won the Major and two grand slams, it's obviously a different thing to work with these kinds of people. But even in NAVI I had experience with dealing with bigger personalities, we had Sasha, so it's not like a full strange situation for me.

At the same time, I can take a lot from what I learned from B1ad3. He is obviously the best coach in the world, and I think his way of doing things is much more detail-oriented than how other teams do it. I think the difference between B1ad3 and me is that for him, he has been doing it for many years, so he has a lot of experience, but I tried to use the time that I was spending with him and working with him to learn from his flaws, also. Basically, I was trying to mesh this together by learning from his mistakes and taking the good things out of his coaching as well to my side.

It's gonna be a bit of a gotcha, but what do you consider B1ad3's flaws?

I think he's a true strategist coach, and I'm trying to balance that a bit more compared to him, being there for the players and try to adjust the system so they can still feel comfortable. However all teams/players need different things. In the two years of working together with Andrii I got on the same page with him in terms of CS, but there are some things I do different in terms of the team culture. Emphasizing a bit more on individual comfort.