Freshly crowned IEM Melbourne 2025 champions, winners of the prestigious ESL Grand Slam, and riding an incredible 21-series win streak – it’s Team Vitality! Immediately after their victory, we managed to capture the raw and unfiltered emotions of flameZ.
We started by simply asking flameZ to articulate his immediate feelings about winning IEM Melbourne, securing the ESL Grand Slam title, and claiming the massive $1,000,000 prize.
“For me it was such a relief and a lot of happiness and love to teammates that share this experience with you. Other than that, I just wanna sleep or get drunk, I don’t get drunk, but I’ll try today maybe.”
“I don’t think anybody gives a fuck about the money, for me, it’s such a relief. Playing this grand final, it was a tough battle and we started out very weak and slow on the last map. We had to grind out the rounds and play together, even then we make mistakes and still fail to go through rounds and do them well, but then we keep going.”
The ESL Grand Slam is an incredibly rare achievement, with Vitality’s triumph at IEM Melbourne marking only the eighth instance of a team accomplishing this feat. We asked flameZ about the pressure the team faced in this grand final, knowing the Grand Slam was within their grasp.
“It is tough to go into a grand final, best-of-five, for the Grand Slam. Much at stake, there is gonna be many emotions, people are gonna make mistakes being nervous and that was a showcase of that today. I’m glad we came on top, I’ve said it many times, but great teams win ugly sometimes and this was an ugly win for us, but we’re happy with it.”
“I remember at one point – it was 12-10, they had B site with a 3v5 and I’m going down secret thinking to myself “The Grand Slam, this opportunity is over, and the win streak is done” and then we come out on top.”
The final map of the best-of-three series against Team Falcons on Nuke stretched into a grueling triple overtime. It was an intense experience for the crowd, but even more so for the players who had to maintain peak performance through it all. flameZ shared his insights into navigating such deep overtimes.
“It was 18-15 for us in overtime and we had three match points and every round we lost we kept pushing each other, we knew that it’s not over. At some point I even forgot how many rounds were needed to win, it was 20-21 and I was like “Oh my God, is it the last round now is it?””
“At some point, we have an advantage ’cause they don’t have as many rounds as we have ’cause they have been a team for a short time. We kept on bringing rounds and kept on like pulling rounds from fucking 2023, we don’t give a fuck what round, just something that we will be able to do.”
“Then at some point, we got together on the same idea, that we just play slow against them. There is no way, you cannot prep for five maps and include a map going in to overtime, you just prep the basics and you try to stick to them. Against them, it flew way over the basics, it was just a showcase of Counter-Strike and the Counter-Strike at the top is gonna look like that sometimes.”
Finally, we observed on the player cameras the intense emotions of Team Vitality’s captain, apEX, throughout the series. He was seen slamming his desk and roaring with elation. We asked flameZ to shed some light on what was being communicated within the team during those highly charged moments.
“On Train, it was really important that he went “Guys, fucking focus up”. You see Train, we lost the 5v3 twice and then we won an eco to win the game, but it could have ended 13-6 if we just didn’t lose those two 5v3s. It was like “Guys, let’s fucking step up, we’re fucking nervous and we’re just ping-ponging with each other”.”
“Then when we got into Nuke, he said he did a lot of mistakes and individually he wasn’t so sharp and TeSeS was just killing him with one-taps every second round and he dies through smoke on door. He couldn’t get into his game, so he was more focusing on himself, trying to do his best.”
“I remember mezii was hyping him up, I think as a team we did a great job to support each other ’cause it was a tough battle and sometimes you have an unlucky match. I think it’s just important for him sometimes to release those emotions out instead of keeping them in. As a team, you’d prefer a teammate to get mad and you know why he’s mad, than just get mad and nobody knows why.”
Check out more of our IEM Melbourne 2025 content or our interview with apEX ahead of the Semifinal.
