In what was the most watched Grand Final in CS:GO history, Astralis defeated Virtus.Pro to become the ELEAGUE Major 2017 champions. Despite under-performing in the Group Stage, the player-owned organization AWPed their way to their first Grand Final at a Major, with Rifler Markus "Kjaerbye" Kjærbye paving the way.

"It's just amazing to win the Major final, even while you feel like team-wise and individually we didn't really peak today," said Markus "Kjaerbye" Kjærbye in an interview with HLTV after the intense series. "It was one of our worst days in a long time.

"The team spirit was just so demoralized and even though it felt bad at most times, we never gave up and we knew that we had it in us."

Kjaerbye's mixed feelings about their performance strongly reflects the set's back-and-forth nature. After losing momentum on Nuke, the set's first map, Astralis managed to turn it around on Overpass and secure a close 16-14 win to even out the series. On the deciding map, Train, Astralis floundered and were forced to fight back from a 13-7 deficit, eventually clawing their way to a 16-14 win.

Related: Astralis win ELEAGUE Major 2017

Kjaerbye believes that the team's rocky performance can be chalked up to a combination of communication failures and avoidable mistakes.

"There were some communication issues and I lost a really stupid round," Kjaerbye expressed with a shake of his head. "[On Overpass] I thought I heard one on upper and I just jumped out and died, so it was a bit more stressful today but in the end we kept out composure and we managed to win."

Kjaerbye had an incredible set, earning the title of MVP despite his self-criticisms. Averaging a 1.22 HLTV player rating through the series, he came second only to VP's Janusz "Snax" Pogorzelski who managed a 1.24 rating.

"I didn't think I had any chance of being the MVP, but it feels great," Kjaerbye said. "I'm always very critical to my own individual performance if I feel like I did some mistakes or wrong pushes I like to review my mistakes and, even though we might win a match pretty comfortably, I really like to review and analyze my play and I'm never satisfied."

Their narrow victory speaks for the high skill cap within the competitive scene. Astralis believe it will be hard to keep the scene's top spot, but Kjaerbye and his teammates have already faced this fact head-on.

"A few months ago, when we were sitting at our first team meeting with gla1ve, our psychologist was saying, 'it will be easy for you to be a top one team in the world but the hardest part is staying at the top,'" Kjaerbye said.

The team now has to live by that logic, bearing the weight of their newly minted Major title. And while Kjaerbye might seem pessimistic, he says that he and his teammates are more than ready to step up to the first place plate.

"In a few months, we won't be top one maybe I think, we all had the same feeling about that," Kjaerbye continued. "Throughout 2016, it was almost criminal to have expectations going into those tournaments but everything just clicked and gla1ve was a really good fit instantly to the team.

"Now it's just all about staying on top and we're going to give 150% to do that."

Kristine "Vaalia" Hutter is a news editor for theScore esports. You can find her on Twitter.