mopoz on Vitality-M8s rivalry: "Maybe today we showed who's the best baguette"

The Spanish player bantered about the rivalry between French organizations.

Gentle Mates continue their hot run in Sweden by upsetting Vitality in the first round of ESL Pro League Season 22 after beating HEROIC, G2, and Legacy in Stage 1.

The Spaniards, who weren't even supposed to be in Stockholm and were handed a late invite, got to show off in an enticing derby as Gentle Mates is a French organization started by former Vitality founders.

We spoke to Alejandro "⁠mopoz⁠" Fernández-Quejo Cano after the big win to hear his thoughts on the series, M8s run at ESL Pro League, the Major race, and grinding back up after a time away from Big Events.

You can listen to the interview, here.

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Congratulations, you started Stage 2 with a win over Vitality. Unexpected for a lot of people I'd say, but how about for you?

It was unexpected for us as well, as it was for the people. And excuse me, because I didn't say thank you for the congrats. Afterwards, I don't know. We are just focusing on our attitude; we want to feel the game and give only positive energy.

Right now, everything we have been working for has paid off, so we are hungry for the next games. They're going to be really tough games because, after beating Vitality, the next teams are not going to underestimate you anymore. The next ones are going to be harder.

Do you think Vitality underestimated you a bit, then?

Maybe. Maybe they tried to play as seriously as they can, but of course there is always going to be kinda underestimating from the best team in the world.

There's a bit of a rivalry between the organizations, I think one of the founders of your organization was also a founder of Vitality. Can you tell me about that? I saw there was some banter back and forth throughout the series.

About the banter, it's not something I know a lot [about] because we just joined the team not a long time ago. As far as I know, of course there is banter between them, so I think maybe today we showed who's the best baguette (smiles).

I heard at the end, around the end with the handshakes, apEX said something like, 'Ayaya, losing to noobies.' Any thoughts on that?

Not really. I mean, for example, you can be mad about it, but it doesn't really matter because Dan [apEX] is that way. He's always just doing those kinds of things, I don't think he really thinks about it, and he's just a guy who always likes to [say] things like that. We don't take it into account, we don't even fucking care.

It seemed like it was in good spirits, like a joke.

Yeah!

You finished fourth at StarSeries Fall, and then at Birch Cup you lost your only HLTV-covered match and went out 13th-16th. alex said at StarSeries that you weren't thinking about the ranking much, but coming into Stage 1 here, there was a lot of pressure on you for the Major. Was that in the back of your mind at all? It doesn't matter now, Stage 2 doesn't affect it, but was that in your heads in Stage 1?

Not really, because when we got a call to come here and we were playing at [Birch Cup] at the Kinguin Centre, it was like, 'Okay guys, now we just leave. Our chance for the Major is going to be almost impossible. but if every single one of us dreams to play in these kinds of tournaments, fuck it, fuck the Major, because we are going to try to prepare everything for the next season.' Just being here is way more important.

Also, even if we don't care about the ranking, maybe it is [just] right now because a few months ago, it was kinda difficult to deal with those things. But we had a talk, we said we need to forget everything about that. If the Major comes, we are going to get it, but if not, we just keep going on our path and just focus on tier-one tournaments.

Talking about that grind, I know you went from the top 100 to top 30, closer to the top 20 now. Doing that grind, under this organization, do you feel like there's some vindication after spending so long trying to find a place to call home?

For us, making this one up... When we talk about it, it's like, 'Okay, we just come from the worst tournaments we have to play. Our coach and a friend of his helped us to understand the Valve Ranking System, so we just started going to those LAN events.

Right now the feeling is super positive, but something that we are trying almost every day is that, even if it's difficult, we've been here 2-3 times before. Something always happens, so we go down once again, but we know the way to reach the top and we are just showing it.

As I said earlier, you went through Stage 1 3-1, you beat G2 and HEROIC, and now you've beaten Vitality in Stage 2. What does that mean for the rest of your tournament, does that add a lot more confidence? Do you feel you can make the playoffs?

Especially in CS2, almost every single team that is here right now, even in tier-two, if they come up here, they can show themselves just to reach the playoffs. There is nothing impossible, and of course beating Vitality is going to give us a lot of confidence. But we are going to keep thinking the same way, just enjoy the moment, be in the present, and give it our all.