NAF: "My roles on Liquid get swapped around like hot potatoes"
Liquid will be North American, at least for a few days. With Robert "Patsi" Isyanov spending some time at home waiting for his passport, Damien "daps" Steele will be standing in while the squad hopes to reach the playoffs in the final group of ESL Pro League Season 18. In answering questions about the last minute stand-in situation, the communication issues within the team, and what he expects to happen in tomorrow's game, Keith "NAF" Markovic spoke with Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore in an interview earlier today.
How long has the team known that Patsi would not be able to make the first match?
Starting off, we were practicing in Europe and around three days ago Patsi and Liquid told us that they were having issues with the visa and might not be able to attend the first or second game, potentially. So we are going to try our best playing with Daps. When we played our practices, we played with Patsi and just try our best with what we got. Fortunately, daps knows what we're doing and roles to fill into. I think it will be difficult, but at the same time he knows what he needs to do for our team. We will just try our best and see what we can achieve.
In terms of how you going to play with daps on the server, is he going to slot into Patsi's slots or maybe even function as the IGL?
It has not been discussed as of right now. Damien has been dealing with some personal things, even within our practices at times. Even at the later stages he had to miss practices due to some personal reasons. So I don't know if it's been talked about as a team, maybe between YEKINDAR and daps it may have been talked about, but I don't know as of now. I think daps will take some of YEKINDAR's positions, but I'm not totally sure. This is probably a question for YEKINDAR, maybe he has some better answers. I'm sure he'll slot into either Patsi's roles or YEKINDAR's roles, I think it's more about YEKINDAR and which spots he sees as more valuable or finds more impact.
YEKINDAR might play the harder positions so Damien doesn't have to play them. It's more about a wait-and-see when he gets into Malta. He'll be in Malta in a few hours, so we'll discuss it then.
Daps told HLTV in an earlier interview that the goal was to peak for Pro League. Do you think we'll see a more refined Liquid now?
I would love to say that if we had that with our full five here, but with our first game, potentially second game, and who-even-knows third game - I wish we could say that but also we're playing with a stand-in. There is really no way for us to peak here, in my opinion unless Patsi gets his passport and shows up and we play our A-game perfectly. There is a potential chance that we could already be down 0-1 or 0-2 depending if we own these teams with a stand-in, especially as a coach. We will have to wait and see. We are going to give it our best, see what happens, but obviously on paper and in our expectations it's going to be hard. I'm not sure what kind of Liquid is going to show up.
Where did the idea come from to potentially bring in Stewie2k?
The Stewie2k proposal, from what I heard... we were naming out players that are not contracted to teams, who know Counter-Strike, and know how to play it pretty well. His name was brought up and I don't know how everyone else ranked it, but I was very encouraging to do it. I would have loved to play with Jake, see him again, and play with him on LAN. I think he has the right personality and the right fit. He loves to come in, plug in and play, and do his thing and I'm sure that he would enjoy it. I know that I always enjoyed playing with Stewie in the past. It was a huge fight for me to get him on board, but I think for Stewie he didn't want to travel all the way here just to play potentially one or two games, that's just, unfortunately, the way it is. We wanted to play with our five, but it would have been really fun.
I was encouraging the team saying, "let's just play with Stewie, man We'll just play the event, I'm sure it's one of the last CS:GO events, let's just play and have fun." If he wasn't allowed to play all the matches, then he said "what's the point then", which I completely understand. It was somewhat serious, we tried, but obviously with how we think of things we want to have our five players to play and don't want to put Patsi on the side just to have Stewie play the whole event, even though I think it would have been a lot of fun.
Has anything changed in the roles or positions with yourself, Rainwaker, and Patsi since we last saw you in Riyadh?
The only spot that I have changed from is on T-side Inferno. I think Patsi and YEKINDAR were playing Banana on the T-side, but with being two, too-aggressive players with the same mindset they were tripping on their toes, which is how it felt in practice. Patsi is now playing window as a T-defaulter and I am playing as the second supporter for YEKINDAR. I think Patsi is better at being aggressive and making his own decisions whereas I am better at being the second or third guy, playing off the guy that is in front of me and knowing when to back up, wait for something, and capitalize when I need to. That is the only change that we have made, my roles on Liquid get swapped around like hot potatoes, but I'm cool with it.
A lot has been said about the communication in this team. Are there any issues with this being Rainwaker and Patsi's first English-speaking squads?
Obviously it's going to be very difficult for these guys. These are two young guys that have never really spoken English on any teams or speaking English at all besides interviews after games. It's very difficult. I think with Patsi, for me personally, it's easy to understand. For Rainwaker, it's at times hard to understand because of his thicker accent, but he has good English. He can work well within our team - we wouldn't be here if we couldn't understand him and he couldn't understand us. He just has a thicker accent compared to Patsi, so sometimes I might not understand it and I might have to ask him twice. For the most part, I'm pretty comfortable with it. They both speak pretty good English, it's just more about them just getting used to it and getting used to understanding things.
Maybe some words they don't understand, but that just comes with each day of us talking, speaking English, shooting the shit together. For them to be communicating in high intense pressure situations in scrims, for the most part it's pretty basic. It's pretty easy. You don't really feel any pressure or intensity when you're playing scrims. You're just playing and trying your best, so you learn things. There's no pressure, nobody's really getting frustrated or anything like that. Then, when it comes to matches, obviously you know, it's life or death in the games, so you don't wanna mess up or anything like that. You want to just do everything perfectly.
So sometimes you might feel that pressure and you know, you might slip up. They might not know what to say exactly, or if they say it too fast, or they don't really know how to articulate the right amount of words in the right sentence for us to understand. In the matches, sometimes it could be a little tricky, but obviously, that just gets better with us playing more and more matches. For the most part, I think it's pretty good. It just takes time for everybody. I've never played out really on a full international lineup and for them, they haven't really just played on teams where they have to speak English. So there's a lot of things everybody needs to learn. So yeah, we're just taking an event-at-event, uh, basis.
We haven't seen much of VP lately, so have you had a hard time preparing and how to prepare against someone like Jame?
Going to the Virtus.pro matchup, we have YEKINDAR, who is a player that has played with Jame, so he understands his philosophy and the way he thinks. It's simply down to the Virtus.pro playstyle and the Jame playstyle. With their matchups previously, maybe there's a limited amount of stuff to go off of. I mean, even for ourselves there's a limited amount of stuff for them to go off of us, because at the same time, we did kind of only play a few matches and there's still a lot of things that we're trying to iron out and change and do different things. So it's hard for them to even read us as well. I feel like it's somewhat of an even matchup, but we have the stand-in situation, whereas, they brought back n0rb3r7, but they already played with n0rb3r7 before and they already know what to expect from him and what roles to put him into. We're on a little bit of a back foot with a stand-in, but you know, we're ready. We know pretty much what to expect and we're just gonna try our best with what we got.
Liquid are scheduled to play against Virtus.pro tomorrow at 10:00AM.
