sycrone: "We wanted to be dangerous and show improvement; we missed the mark"-cs 2 new case

MOUZ's coach reacted to the team's early elimination at IEM Katowice in an interview with HLTV.

MOUZ entered IEM Katowice eager to show another good result after they made it to the semi-finals at the IEM Rio Major in November, but to start the new year they ended up eliminated in last place of Group B after two close losses to OG and Complexity.

MOUZ were eliminated after losses to OG and Complexity

Reacting to the losses and early elimination in Poland, Dennis "⁠sycrone⁠" Nielsen spoke to HLTV about the disappointing campaign, what went wrong, and how the team will address the result moving forward.

It was a two-month wait since the Rio Major, the last time you got to play. This couldn't have been the expectation that you had coming into IEM Katowice.

Not at all. We started early January, practicing, and we set the goal that Katowice should be another playoffs attempt. We weren't expecting to go for the trophy fully, but we just wanted to be dangerous and show signs of improvement. I think we missed the mark there. We did play a lot of close maps, but a lot of areas where we were missing a lot of percentages this event.

I think we'll talk that we were competitive in some series and we felt like we could have closed out some games. Also that we lost more to ourselves Dennis "⁠sycrone⁠" Nielsen

Ultimately, just a few rounds away in both matches against OG and Complexity. What do you think you were missing?

I think we were way more stressed out than maybe we should have been in some of the situations where we had numbers advantage or map control advantage. I think the tone of your voice should reflect what kind of situation the team is in. I think at times we were too stressed, maybe it's because it's the first tournament and we were very overly excited to play again. Maybe it's partially also that some of the teams we played had played play-ins, and we did not this time. In the past this is something that worked great for us because we could find our form and shape and test out the things we'd done in practice. This time it just had to work from the start, and it didn't.

What is going to be the biggest focus in the upcoming weeks? You have Pro League in maybe a month's time, tell me about how the team is going to reflect on this result and what you're going to work on.

I think everyone has to be honest with themselves and each other and look where they were wrong at this event compared to others. I see a lot of different areas where we were.

Anything in particular that's going to be a big team talk after these couple of games?

I think we'll talk that we were competitive in some series and we felt like we could have closed out some games. Also that we lost more to ourselves, I would say. This will probably be some of the main focus points.

The advantage of teams not knowing what you worked on should work more in your favor, and it really didn't Dennis "⁠sycrone⁠" Nielsen

You mentioned the long break. Is this something you might address moving forward in the future, joining lower-tier events to make sure your guys aren't rusty?

Some of the other teams had the pleasure of playing BLAST and we didn't. We did take steps to be prepared for this moment. We have this concept called must-wins and we did a few of those before coming to this. Basically, we tried to replicate as close to possible a real match scenario. We did that and also the advantage of teams not knowing what you worked on should work more in your favor, and it really didn't.

Was Anubis at all part of a talk you had? It was a big meta change and you didn't get to play as a lot of the other teams, to test out the map and potentially experiment with the map pool. Was it a discussion at all inside the team?

Yeah, of course. Just at the start when it came out and they replaced Dust2, it gave us a lot of options in terms of the map pool because we could choose to just permaban it or we could try to play all seven maps. Obviously, at this event it was not really the opportunity to pull it out yet, maybe it's something we'll look more into if there's a chance to play. We'll see if we do that.