mousesports were 2-0 up after the first day, beating fnatic and FaZe, but couldn't close out the game against NiP on Cache to qualify for the playoffs on the second day.

chrisJ praised LMBT, who helps a lot with leadership

Before they faced Natus Vincere, we talked to mousesports' in-game leader Chris "⁠chrisJ⁠" de Jong.

I wanna start with getting your general thoughts on you going into the in-game leading role and how that has been going for you?

I would say that me going into the in-game leading role is going quite smooth I would say. I'm getting great support, mainly from my coach. He's teaching me lot of stuff about how to call, how to keep the team together. He also does a lot of work preparing for opponents, preparing game plans for us, adding strategies to our stratbook. That is making it a lot easier for me even though I still have a lot to learn. I'm obviously not as experienced as some of the other in-game leaders in other topteams.

I can ask you about that, when looking up to some other in-game leaders or teams, how they play, how would you envision mousesports playing? What is the ideal style, what do you want to accomplish with this team?

I don't think that our style is that different than that of a team with an experienced in-game leader. I mean, I think I'm doing an okay job, but when you look at, for example, how gob b is leading a team, at least when I played with him, he was making all the strats and the gameplans himself. In that, he took on more jobs than I'm doing right now.

I mean, I'm making the calls on the start of the rounds, usually. For example, oskar is also giving a lot of ideas or just saying "OK, we need to do this now". Honestly, I'm always going to listen to oskar when he has an idea and he decides to talk because the guy has such good gamesense, he has so much experience. When he has a read on the game, then it's going to be a good read and we just need to do that.

But yeah, what I was saying about in-game leaders, I mean, LMBT would be our in-game leader if Valve didn't add this coaching rule. So he creates our game idea and that is something I'm not doing. I'm just calling, not exactly just what I'm told to because obviously, you need to adapt during a match. Sometimes we use timeouts for that and he will say what we should do. But I'm still trying to follow his style of leading, you know.



About oskar, you mentioned that you listened to him when he decides to talk, so he is a more quiet guy, but his input is still very valuable, when he decides to give it?

It depends, sometimes he is quiet, mostly, in some practices I think he doesn't talk as much as he could (laughs), but when he is motivated, when we are in a match, he is always vocal, he communicates well, and when he is feeling it he also gives really good ideas. Everybody listens to him, everybody respects him, I mean, yeah, maybe it's not so clear like before with NiKo, but I think oskar is clearly the best player on the team. The guys respect him, and when he has a good idea we just go with it and it usually works.

The first match you had here was that against fnatic, the second half, when you switched to the CT side was perhaps more interesting. It seemed like you had a total read on fnatic and what they were doing. Was that the case?

Yeah, our setup just worked against them. They played kind of slow, we talked about it before, how they are playing right now. It seemed like they played more structured than they did in the past when they were at their peak, I guess they felt like they had to adjust that. But it worked well for us, our setups were good, we took mid control at the right times, we pushed alley once when it was kind of good, other than that I felt the space to do what I wanted around the six train with the AWP. I was always in the position where I could get at least one or two kills and then my teammates were cleanup. We just felt comfortable, they let us play our game.

Against FaZe, you started on the T side and had a great T side on Nuke, tell me a bit about that?

We won the knife round and we chose T side on purpose because it was getting really late and we knew FaZe was tired, we knew we were also tired and it's just harder as CT to stop the T's when they start rolling, when your communication and stuff is not on point. When it's late, people are tired, not so focused, they are always going to make mistakes in the rotations and the communication. We just knew, if we win the pistol, get the first anti-eco's, we are able to roll them over, doesn't matter if it's FaZe or whatever team. We know we have the firepower that if start rolling, we are going to get to a 11-4, a 12-3 half. And that happened, we constantly picked them apart, I don't know if they were making that big mistakes, we played quite OK I would say.

Obviously, if they were not tired they would play better but I guess the same could be said for us. Anyway, it just worked in the end, I feel like we should've won the T side even a bit higher because we broke them a few times and we didn't really capitalize on it so much. But yeah, 11-4 was good, in the end the CT side was a bit hard but we kept our heads cool and we closed it out.

Then the NiP game, that could've already gotten you into the playoffs. Tell me a bit about that game, it seemed that you had a good first half, but it didn't turn out be that good in the end?

Yeah, we felt like we had a really good first half, I mean, we are not that good on CT side Cache, we ourselves couldn't remember the last time we got more than 9 rounds, even though we felt like we should've won more. Those 9 rounds should've been ok because it's not rare for us to get more than 10 rounds on T side Cache. I don't know what went wrong on T side, we didn't get into the game, we had some good ideas, we went to take mid and stuff, but we just executed it badly.

When we played standard, oskar got picked off a few times, unlucky I would say. He got killed through a smoke and then they made a boost in B. And oskar was just on fire, I think if he didn't get picked off and he could've played his game there we would have won. Still, he had an incredible impact on the CT side. We felt kind of... I don't know if we threw, I mean NiP played good, f0rest played really sick obviously. But yeah, we could've played better there for sure.

After that match, I saw you had a little team discussion, LMBT talked with you, saying what went wrong and stuff like that, so what did you take away from that, coming here into the third day of the group stage?

We felt like we just had to come to the match day with a different mentality. The day of the NiP match we all slept till really long, we were like "OK, we beat fnatic and FaZe, we are almost there", chilling a bit too much, not so focused on the game. Practice didn't go so well because we weren't talking too much, we got into a bad kind of atmosphere during the practice I would say. And yeah, [after the NiP game] we just said that we have to show up today, wake up early, get some breakfast, get our heads into the game the whole day. Try to get a different mentality again.