We caught up with Mathias "⁠MSL⁠" Lauridsen after North's first game at DreamHack Valencia and talked about benching Daniel "⁠mertz⁠" Mertz and trying out English communication.

Despite a slow start in the match against Giants, going down 0-7 on the CT side of Inferno, North managed to keep their composure and come back to win their first game of the tournament 16-8, advancing to the winner's match of group A.

MSL feels like mertz needs some more time playing CS at a lower tier

In an post-match interview, we learned about MSL thoughts on AWPing talent in Denmark, North's CT side issues and his impressions of playing with Oscar "⁠mixwell⁠" Cañellas.

What was the decision behind bringing mixwell as a stand-in, and why him?

We talked about getting an English-speaking stand-in to try it out because I think we're lacking AWP talents in Denmark. Or we have talents, but we want an AWPer who can kill a lot and play smart, so we wanted to try playing with him because he's a smart player and good with the AWP, and we can also see how it goes with playing in English.

Talking about AWP talents, mertz is a talent, but didn't work out on the team. Can you let me know what happened there?

I think he's a big talent but I just think he needed some more time playing lower level CS. For example, take s1mple, he played on HellRaisers, FlipSid3, etc. before he turned up on the big stages, so I think mertz needs more time to develop himself and figure out how to play smart and also play his style. He just needs some time and to work really hard.

At the beginning of the year you struggled a bit, can you run me through the evolution of the team in the past few months?

I think at the beginning we were playing OK, but we never felt like we were playing well or up to our potential. We played better on our CT side than we did the last couple of months. I think our T side got good on every map after a while because ave and I put in a lot of work and everyone knows their role and what to do. Our T sides were good even with mertz, but the CT side was a complete disaster. I think that's why we became a bit better, but if you want to beat the best teams you really need a good CT side.

Our T sides were good even with mertz, but the CT side was a complete disaster; if you want to beat the best teams you really need a good CT side Mathias "⁠MSL⁠" Lauridsen

This begs two questions, one being ave, he's been on for quite a while now. What has he brought to the team? How is he helping out?

He's helping out with a lot of things, set-ups, tactics, pushing me about mid-round calls and about fixing a lot of mistakes, and so on...

The second question is then regarding that CT side you talk about. You've been struggling on it, so what's the solution you're going to try and instill to get your CTs back to a good level?

First of all we need to find a fifth player, but yeah... we just need to go home and work before the Major. It's hard to know what will make our CT side good, because they're so much about individuals playing their role well and not taking too many chances, but at the same time taking the right chances and aiming well. Lately, we have just been taking the wrong duels, making the wrong stacks, and it's all because we lack confidence. So yeah, just need a lot of work.

How are the English comms going? When you picked up mixwell for the event part of it was to get to use English comms. How is that working out, and would look in the future to pick an English-speaking player up?

This is actually a test for us, how it will be. I think we'll look back after this event and evaluate how it went with mixwell and using the English comms. We can see from there. Right now we're not sure about our fifth and we need to see. We just played with English comms and it was very weird in the beginning but it turned out to be fine and I think it went pretty well. It's a fun experience at least.

Coming into the event, what were the goals? To take the whole thing?

When you play in North you always expect or want to win, so that's definitely the goal. At the same time, anything can happen and it's not like we're saying "oooh, we should win this." It's just that we need to have the winning mentality and, of course, we will do everything we can to win.

Who do you think are the biggest rivals here, G2?

Yeah, they are definitely going to be the hardest opponent. They have been playing really well and they have been finding out how to play, so I'm looking forward to hopefully playing against them.

Lastly, tell me a bit about before the event. You didn't have time to play with mixwell, right? So have you prepared at all, how are you coming into this?

We woke up this morning and went through some of the stuff on Inferno and Train because we knew those would be the maps we needed to prepare. So yeah, everything happened this morning, [yesterday] we just chilled a bit and enjoyed life by the pool because mixwell came in at night and some of the other guys came in really late.

But you practiced this morning, or?