Nifty: "We just didn't show up the way we wanted to"
We've sent intrepid Texan Collin "CarbonDogma" Davis to the ESL Pro League finals this weekend, to secure interviews and the like. The latest of which comes from Renegades IGL Noah "Nifty" Francis, discussing performances at this event and previous, the Asia Minor and coach Aleksandar "kassad" Trifunović.
First off, you had two different performances here compared to Sydney; what do you attribute the different results to?
So it's sort of hard just because Sydney was different for us in so many ways. Just the matter of being in Australia, the matter of it being Sydney, our major goal was wanting to make it to the stage. All of that was super different. Not to say that our goals here were any different, because obviously we want to make it to the stage, make it as far as we could. It's just weird for us right now because we're dealing with so many different things that we want to change and actually build, so that we can all be more consistent as a team and feel better and stuff like that.
It's not easy to put that into place every other week. We came into this tournament and wanted to perform well, but we just didn't show up the way we wanted to. I mean it is the way it is, it's not the end of the line and you have another chance every other week - that's the way I see it. We'll get there eventually.
I wanted to ask about the SK game in particular, what went wrong or what they did well in particular?
So in the SK game I think pretty much all of their players were performing extremely well, they were reading us really well. I wasn't necessarily doing as well as I thought I could have, in terms of just calling the game. I mean that kind of sucked, but I felt like at the same time I didn't have to, because I feel like I could have called the more simplistic things that I did and it could have just worked. A lot of things were just going their way, in terms of timing and trades. Just trades were going their way, every time that we tried to enter a site, one guy got two of us and we could only get him, then we're still down a man making it difficult. A lot of things were going their way and it just didn't happen for us this time around against SK, maybe next time it will.
It's been some time since Joakim "jkaem" Myrbostad joined, how has he fit in compared to your previous teammate, NAF?
Well, jkaem is obviously a different player to NAF - doing different things as he's a different person. NAF's an extraordinary player, so is jkaem. Right now it's just about making it work with all of us together, with all of us feeling confident and prepared. Once we have that, everyone will be playing extremely well and I'm very confident for that. It's very nice having jkaem on the team because he's a very positive, uplifting guy so he's a good person to have in our squad. That's one of the reasons why we have him in our squad, he's awesome.
You guys have been invited to the next Asia Minor, having won the previous two. What do you think your chances are going in, do you think you're favorites?
I'm sure people will call us favorites. We're going to show up at the Minor and just play to win it. We know that TyLoo and other Aus teams are going to be there, and we're just going to show up and do our best. We obviously want to make it to the next stage of the Major.
Some of the bigger news was from the other day, where Aleksandar "kassad" Trifunović said he was going to be leaving the team. How much did he bring to the team?
kassad brought a lot to the team, he's very good at breaking down rounds and situations. When you look back at demos with him, or even just talking with him about the situations, he's very good at pin-pointing the certain things that needed to happen, maybe more so than other coaches. He's very, very good at that and when he comes with the passion, it's really nice as well. Everyone knows him for his facial expressions and his body language when he's behind us whilst we're playing, putting his hands on his head and stuff like that. All of that is great from him.
We felt like it was time for something new. It was completely mutual between ourselves and him, so we obviously wish him nothing but the best and we had a good time with him - we're still friends.
How will you be adapting with life after kassad?
Well, we're going to be trying out a bunch of different things. We're going to be looking to try different coaches at different events, maybe. It's hard to figure out what we're going to be doing really, we really haven't had the time between Dallas and Sydney. We're going to work through it, sift and sort through the options and whatever it is we're going to pick it based on what we're happy with. We're not just going to pick a guy, go "he's the guy!" and not know for sure that he is the guy we need. We'll see where we end up but we're really confident either way.
From here, Renegades will have just over a week to figure out what to do about a potential kassad replacement, as their next outing will be in Ukraine for the StarSeries i-League Season 5 finals, starting May 28th.
