In a candid interview with Imba TV, translated by DotaLand, EHOME coach and manager Tang "71" Wenyi spoke about his many years in the Chinese esports scene, from coaching a Counter-Strike team out of an abandoned elementary school in 2005, to leading teams to million dollar tournaments and managing a top organization in 2016.

Over his long career, 71 has coached two of China's top Dota teams, EHOME and DK, leading EHOME to victory in MarsTV Dota 2 League Winter 2015 and the Shanghai Open in 2016. However, 71 has fond memories of the era in which he and his players scrimmed in internet cafes and lived in very different conditions than they do today.

"There’d often be no running water, so we would go in pairs to the nearby well to get water so we could bathe," 71 said of the old days. "It would be in the open air in the village, bathing in front of other villagers and their cows. That cold, and the scenes, but there was friendship and there was fun. If you had me do that again today, I would still do it. But today’s players wouldn’t. Nowadays if there isn’t fruit in the training room they already want to murder the team lead,"

71 spoke extensively of developing team captains, praising Dong "DC" Can and Zou "820" Yitian as the best he's ever encountered, saying "within the hundreds of players I’ve had, there are nearly none that come close to those two."

He was somewhat less complementary when speaking of current coach, Zhang "LaNm" Zhicheng, saying the 25-year-old player has trouble working with his players' strengths.

"Speaking of captains, on the one hand they need to have the prestige and respect to focus the team around him, this is required," 71 said. "But only this is not nearly enough. On the other hand they need to have the ability to develop, and play things to their players’ strengths. For LaNm, in this latter aspect he cannot be considered to be excellent, though he does hold absolute respect."

He also talked about EHOME's 5-6th finish at The International 2016, including their embarrassing loss to Evil Geniuses who managed to win Game 1 in their series even with EHOME spawning megacreeps.

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"Against EG we indeed should not have lost," 71 said. "People were saying how in game one we lost after having megacreeps, how that was an epic, legendary game. If you ask me, it was dogshit. At that time EG was noob, we were even more noob, I can’t see what part of that is epic or legendary at all. Mentally overall we couldn’t really get in a good spot either, the team stopped improving in-game, we just put our tactics out there for others to counter. It’s like you play cards with your hand open while the others are playing with their hands hidden, can you possibly not lose?"

The loss was especially disappointing after EHOME asked Ren "ELeVeN" Yangwei to return to the team because things with his replacement, Fan "FaN" Yixuan, weren't working out. ELeVeN stepped down from the starting roster in May in order to take care of his ailing grandfather.

"I calculated a bit, and at the time I thought our changes of making it through were less than 3%. This meant that we wouldn’t even make it to the main qualifiers, we would only get to watch TI at home, which would be a pretty big problem," 71 said. "The team atmosphere at the time was really bad, emotions were really low. Then in the end we made the decision to make another change, we asked Eleven to have someone else take care of his grandfather, we got him to come back and we had [Daryl "iceiceice" Koh Pei Xiang] go play carry. After this change honestly, it wasn’t really solving our problems either."

While iceiceice left the team following a disappointing performance at TI6, 71 says the split was amicable and that the player did not deserve the online scorn he received.

"After TI he’d already told us that he wanted to go back to Singapore to play, and we respected his wish. I feel that the outside world is quite unfair to him, he is originally an offlaner, but in an emergency time of need he took up the responsibility of playing carry," 71 said. "This was a huge challenge for him, and it was a result of our team having no other options. Iceiceice practiced the most out of the time, he is actually really hard working, so no matter how poorly he might play I don’t think the blame can go to him! From the bottom of my heart, I appreciate iceiceice, I respect him."

71 spoke in detail about the process of building a roster through the chaos of the post-TI fall shuffle, saying Lu "Fenrir" Chao had insisted on leaving the team while Liu "Sylar" Jiajun of Vici Gaming had actually approached them.

"Sylar approached LaNm himself, and we felt it was pretty good so we just decided on him. In terms of four position we considered [Wong "ChuaN" Hock Chuan]. ChuaN plus LaNm we felt would be a pretty good combination, but it didn’t work out," he said. "And then Wings were rumored to be disbanding due to players wanting to continue their schooling, with [Li "iceice" Peng] even dropping his team registration for a while, so we went to try and recruit him and have Fenrir and iceice be our support duo with LaNm transitioning to coach, but then Wings decided to not be making any changes anymore. Fenrir spoke to us himself about wanting to leave the team, we really really wanted to keep him, and we communicated many times afterwards to that effect. But in the end Fenrir felt that he couldn’t take back the words that he’d already spoken, so he went to VG.J."

Despite growth and success, 71 says there’s still plenty of work for him and his organization to do as EHOME gets ever larger.

“In the end, I hope that EHOME can continue to improve, and continue to learn from the top clubs domestically and internationally in order to become a leading force in the next generation of this industry.”

Sasha Erfanian is a news editor for theScore esports. Follow him on Twitter, it'll be great for his self-esteem.