Grayhound started off the tournament with a rought loss to Cloud9, falling to the North American side 16-6 on Mirage. However, the Australians pulled it together and put up a brilliant performance in the lower bracket, eliminating SK with a 2-1 win.

The way Cloud9 punished them helped Grayhound improve before playing SK

In a post-match interview, we talked to Ollie "⁠DickStacy⁠" Tierney about his team's status in the Australian scene, attending a tournament of this status and pulling off the upset over Gabriel "⁠FalleN⁠" Toledo and co.

I want to gauge your feeling while they are fresh, so how does it feel: you just beat SK, in a BO3, on LAN?

It's pretty crazy, it's pretty unbelievable because they are legends of the game, and we as a team haven't been playing together for that long. I'm pretty new to CS, the team's pretty new together as well, malta we picked up three weeks ago. I know they have a replacement in Stewie2K, but just the caliber of players they are, to beat them is a pretty good win.

People that know a bit about Australian CS probably know ORDER, because they played a few international events recently, maybe Chiefs from last year. Tell me a bit about you as a team, how you came together and where you are in the Australian scene?

As players, we have different pasts, but we came together after competing in the Aussie scene for a while. We are all capable players and that's why we came to form this team about six months ago. Our results in Australia are very good, very clean, we don't have much of a challenge in this area, except among the top four, which is ORDER, Tainted Minds, Chiefs and us. In Australia it's pretty smooth and steady, but coming to these events we really have to come together and it really makes us analyze our gameplay and become better.

We can start with that, what was the preparation like and what were you expecting coming here, playing against these teams?

What we're expecting... honestly we were confident. I know it sounds cocky, but we only win in Australia so to play against these players that really test you and really punish you for your mistakes is something that we were looking forward to, but we were kind of confident at the same time. We thought like: "We are good at CS, we can easily compete with these teams". So it was a bit of a shock for us when we faced Cloud9, they really punished us for our very basic mistakes and made us learn on our Mirage. We brought that into the SK game and clearly, focusing more and getting more in-depth with our gameplay really helped us beat SK on that map.

On Mirage it was 12-6 for them at one point, you are playing the CT side and on the other side of the server you have FalleN, coldzera, fer, multiple major winners...

Ahh, it's scary man...

...so how do you make that comeback right there?

It is pretty scary, but you have six rounds already, so you think "These guys aren't unbeatable", you just gotta focus, together. Honestly, when we were playing and we were losing those rounds, we realized our mistakes and we learned from them, so going forward we knew that if we fix these little things, we can beat them, beat legends.

You lost Cache and then you go on to Overpass, that is a map you are pretty confident on, as far as I know?

Yeah, so Overpass was probably our strongest map when we formed this team, we were pretty much undefeated on it. We have been in a bit of a slump recently on it, maybe because we became too repetitive on it, we try to work on other maps so we just kept doing the same thing and haven't tried to upgrade it or anything. But then, honestly, we knew that SK probably didn't do too much prep on us because "Oh, they are Aussie underdogs, as long as we perform to our best, we can beat them". But we knew that Overpass was a strong map for us and we knew that we had the advantage, to be honest.

Tell me the key rounds or things that you remember from Overpass that got you the win in the end.

The key rounds; obviously both of the pistol rounds which we won, winning both pistols in essentially a BO1, because it came down to the last map, is a huge thing. We did lose an anti-eco and they did win ecos against us three times I think, on the CT side, which really did screw with our heads, screw our momentum. Coming into CT we honestly had full momentum, we were constantly putting them on the back foot, they were constantly force-buying which kind of made it easy for us, especially with that B hold. Honestly, all the rounds on CT were all-important rounds, we just capitalized on them while they were just force-buying away.

Next up for you is FaZe, what's the thinking going into that match?

Honestly, I didn't even know I was playing FaZe until five minutes ago, I thought Renegades would've lost, although I do back the Aussies, FaZe is just a higher tier team. Coming into FaZe, I don't know what to think, I'm flabbergasted after winning against SK so I guess I'll will go home and within three hours be: "Shit, I'm playing FaZe tomorrow". We'll just do the basics, play our game and try not to change too many things up, just focus on our game and try to tap some heads.

I don't usually ask people if they want to do shoutouts, but you just beat SK on LAN so you get the privilege.

Well, shout out to our org Grayhound, Mr. Grayhound ([the team owner]) is the best. Shoutout to my entire team, they are top blokes. Shoutout to xara, our content creator, she is really good at her job, and also fim, our editor, he is the man. And shoutout to my mom and dad, of course!