Aleksib & ruggah from OG were kind enough to sit down and give us some time to talk at ESL Pro League. We asked about their Mirage dominance at the moment, their preferred opponent in the Quarterfinals, and what it is about forZe that make them some a tricky team to beat.
Josh: Aleksib, you guys will play either mousesports or NiP. Is there a team that you think will win and is there a team that you’d prefer to play?
Aleksib: I think that the team who’s going to win that match will most likely be NiP and I’m only giving them a slight edge because they’re picking Ancient against any team there is right now, at least from what I’ve seen. I’m not sure if I’m too convinced about mousesports’ Ancient compared to theirs, so they have a slight edge on the veto. That’s why I’m giving it for NiP this time.
Josh: You guys played Mirage five times in five series and you won four of them. I was wondering you guys have been putting a lot of practice into the map or is it something that you guys were just feeling on the day?
Aleksib: I think both. It fits our style kind and we have some good ideas on how the players play the map right now. The individuals shine on the map and that’s why we find some success at times.
Grady: Looking back at your Group Stage results, you only lost two maps, one of which was against forZe, who a lot of teams didn’t expect to make it to the playoffs. Were you guys surprised at all by how well they were playing?
ruggah: I would say both yes and no. From experience, we’ve had some killer series against them, so even though it was with xsepower and another one back in the day, they’re still a team that knows how to manipulate a lot of things on the server. Once you’re on the outside, you don’t always see it. We knew that playing forZe was one of the bigger challenges because we just came from two match-ups where we knew how VP and G2 played, then we had to learn what stage of development that forZe was in. That took some time, like trying to find their tendencies and what their map pool was. When you are a team like forZe that has been grinding these lesser tournaments, that map pool can be really hard to digest and find out what are they actually good at.
In that regard, once we put together the puzzle, we knew that forZe was going to be a tough match. Probably not as hard hitting as some of the other top teams in the world, but more as it was a bit unique style they had, but also us coming in having the favorite tag on us and knowing that we need to beat these guys to win the group. All things considered, we knew it was a hard task, but I’m glad we managed to pull through and win.
