swecon: "We were set on winning"

HLTV.org sat down with several swecon members at DreamHack Summer 2012 to hear them about the qualifier.

Brasil Gaming's surprise exit is still on everyone's mouth at DreamHack Summer and on HLTV.org. Sent packing by a team unknown to most members of the international audience, we took it upon ourselves to get to know more about the Swedish team.

Although they are out of the qualifier following a crushing defeat to ColdGame, we invited the squad to the press area at DreamHack for a chat. Turns out they are more than a mix team.

Three of the members have been playing together for more than a couple of years. Alexander "zodiak" Foneska and Christoffer "lunedi" Olsson, however, linked up with them in August last year.

After being introduced to four of the players, Christian "zoddi" Murberg, Foneska, Martin "zourN" Seipel and Olsson, we sent some questions in Foneska's direction, the team captain.

You beat Brasil Gaming, but only claimed second place in your group. Care to explain?

Well, first of all we had a lot of problems with the computers earlier to when we started and we had not had as much practice and warmup as we should've. Christian "zoddi" Murberg especially had a lot of problems with his computer. We had to change the network card and stuff like that. It took a lot of time. They even delayed our match because of that, so we were not really on our top. 

It was also our first game for us in, like, three days. We hadn't played at all. After that, I mean, we've had pretty good results against real teams, like zNation and Natus Vincere. But when it comes to mix teams, they just run, so we're not really comfortable with that yet, so most of our good results have been playing against real teams and not mix teams. Playing against Brasil Gaming was like an official match for us.

You were down 9-13 and things looked rather grim, but you prevailed. What exactly happened?

We kind of knew that we had to get an entry on the far-side alley for us to move in. I mean, we wanted them to, like, move all over the map, so we could take them out when we heard them moving around and stuff like that. For every single weapon round that we took, we knew we could just run them over in the following rounds.

After that we were just all so excited. Besides that I don't really know what happened. Some of the stuff we did we don't even understand, so yeah, we were pretty excited.

Were you surprised that you were able to pull the win off, or did you know your team was up for the challenge and capable enough to come out victorious?

As I said earlier, after the results against Natus Vincere and zNation and beating eSrael, we know that we have a lot of potential to put up good fights against other teams, we just need a lot of practice and to play more and more.

We said to ourselves that we would go into the match with zero expectations and just do what we've usually done. And de_train is our favorite map, so, I mean, we just played like we talked about.

Was there any pressure going into the match?

Yes, there was a lot of pressure in the beginning, of course. This was our first game in which we've had so many spectators watching us. I can't speak for my teammates, but I felt everyone was feeling the pressure. After we took the gun round, we started moving smooth again. Our mentalities were then set on winning the game, which we ultimately did.

How did you feel after you realized you had defeated the Brazilian veterans?

Me and my friend just jumped around, took a few swings at our computers and so on. It was so sick. This was our first official win against such a team. I can still barely believe it. It's sick.

What went wrong in your match against ColdGame?

We all felt like we had no hours of sleep behind us. We were really excited coming here, and then the travel here, and one of my teammates had just had his birthday party, so he was kind of hungover, but he still did his thing. All our energy was lost, probably from all the celebrating after our victory against Brasil Gaming. We had nothing left.

Somehow, I'm not sure, it felt like [ColdGame] knew exactly what we were doing. When we bannned maps, de_tuscan and de_train were the only maps left. We had already taken down Brasil Gaming on de_train, so we thought they would go for de_tuscan, but they went for de_train, and that was just so weird. 

Then it took a lot of time before the game started. Everywhere we went, we thought we'd just play like we did in the previous match and hopefully win, because we know that the team we just beat were a hell of a lot better than ColdGame. Then we felt our energy was low and that we could try to take out the important kills to make ends meet.

Do you have any plans for the future? Any tournaments on foreign soil?

Right now we've just started small. We attended a lot of smaller tournaments in Sweden first, which we won, and our sponsors are feeling more comfortable with us. That's why they sent us here. They feel comfortable in everything we do right now, so they are starting to send us to bigger tournaments.

After mentioning sponsor, I got more intrigued. The team captain continued by explaining how they are sponsored by two companies based in the United States, Noble US and Turbine, the latter even being a part of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

Follow HLTV.org's Pus on Twitter.