Falcons’ improved on their poor start to the season at BLAST Open Porto, casting aside an early exit from BLAST Bounty and a top-eight finish at Esports World Cup by making it all the way to the semi-finals in Portugal. Despite their improvement Falcons found themselves caught short when facing Spirit, losing their semi-final bout in 0-2 fashion.
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Spirit advance to BLAST Porto final over Falcons
“There are some positives, but a lot of negatives,” Nikola “NiKo” Kovač told HLTV when reflecting on his team’s run. “The whole event has been really up and down for us, one game would be and then one game would be shit, back and forth all the time.”
With a break from tournaments ahead of Falcons, NiKo spoke to HLTV about his team’s start to the season, the reason for their downturn in form, and Finn “karrigan” Andersen’s role in the team’s tendency to play to the level of their opponents.
You can read the full interview here
A disappointing start to the season, but do you think you can take away some positives from this event? Ancient today looked better than it previously has, and you earned a convincing win over G2?
Uh, yeah. There are some positives, but a lot of negatives. The whole event has been really up and down for us, one game would be and then one game would be shit, back and forth all the time. I would say the main positive is yesterday’s game against G2, it was very good. Not just that we won, but the way we approached the game, the way we behaved throughout the whole game.
Also today as well, our mental… I could feel that mentally we were there the whole time, we never gave up, we kept fighting. We knew that we could come back from any moment in the half. So these are the positives.
It can be hard mentally when you are constantly losing your map pick
The negatives obviously are that the map pool has been awful for us this event, losing our map picks constantly. It’s very hard to win series when you lose, I think we lost every map pick that we had at this event, so it’s hard. We need to look for more consistency as well, it’s been too much a day and night for us right now.
What do you that map pool inconsistency down to? Is it because you are trying to move away from constantly picking Dust2? So inevitably there will be some teething issues.
Yeah I mean obviously Dust2 is the only reliable map for us right now, but we know that Spirit are also, for example, very good on it. Sometimes we don’t get a chance to pick it. For us it’s hard right now, even Anubis… Anubis felt worse in practice than for example Ancient and Nuke, so it’s very hard to pick it. Maybe we should just pay attention a bit less to what’s happening in practice, and focus on how we approach the maps in important games.
It’s something we have to really dive into and figure out what the issues are. It’s causing a lot of lack of consistency for us right now, and obviously it creates a bit of… not necessarily tension when we play, but it can be hard mentally when you are constantly losing your map pick. We will look for improvements and hopefully it will be better for EPL.
If we can perform in the playoffs, we have to perform in the group stage
A lot of people look at an IGL like karrigan and say you have to take the rough with the smooth; he will come up clutch in really big games, like he did in the Major, but sometimes in these lesser tournaments or group stages, his teams do drop in level. Is that something you’re aware of internally, or how do you feel about that?
I mean I don’t think… I’m not sure. I honestly don’t want to put too much thoughts into it, I don’t really believe it that way. It just feels like we are underperforming as a team and overall, I don’t think it’s just him, me… just as a team it feels like we are just not there, you know? I feel like we are not carrying well the confidence we had from the Major, I think it rather hurt us more than we actually benefitted from the confidence.
When it comes to that kind of logic behind karrigan, I don’t believe in it. We are in it together for this, we just need to look for improevements. We know that we can play better and we have to play better, it’s no question. If we can do it in an arena we have to be able to do it in the group stage. If it was the other way round, I would say okay, maybe we are a bit stressed and making wrong decisions, but if we can perform in the playoffs, we have to perform in the group stage. So we have to look for what’s causing those issues in the groups and try to do better.
