After a loss to mousesports, who took down fnatic on Train with a 16-11 scoreline, the Swedes went on to play Heroic in the second round of the group stage. Olof "⁠olofmeister⁠" Kajbjer and co. had a better time against Marco "⁠Snappi⁠" Pfeiffer's side, defeating the Danes 16-6 on Mirage.

fnatic resorted to changes after a disappointing ECS showing

After their second match of the day, we sat down with Robin "⁠flusha⁠" Rönnquist to hear about the team's recent struggles that resulted in a leadership change.

Let's go back to DreamHack Summer, you were in the final there, you had the home crowd and a chance to get your first title in a long time. After losing that, tell me a bit about the takaways from that tournament and that final in particular?

Yeah, our confidence got back after that, winning a map against SK, a map we haven't played against a good team in a while. We got our confidence back up, but after that, ECS made us not that confident anymore.

You had a tweet after DreamHack, about your map pool, so I guess that still might be a problem. You said that you don't know what are your best maps, is that something you have figured out in the meantime?

It's really hard to say, we feel like Train should be one of our good maps but we lose it every time and Inferno we lost the last times we played it. Cobblestone we've been doing good in practice but we haven't played official matches on it yet. We're playing every map in the pool but I don't know if it is us playing a map wrong or just us not being good at the game. We can definitely play all the maps and we are not afraid to play any of them.

After DreamHack you had ECS, at that event you had the easier group, so to say, and in the end, you went out to Cloud9 and Liquid, two North American teams. What was happening there, what went wrong for you?

I don't know honestly, maybe it's just that most of didn't show up, I feel like it was only JW who was playing well at that event. Maybe we just had an off event or something like that.

Still figuring out the issues and what is happening, what did you work on, in your limited time, before coming here?

We switched some things, like KRIMZ is doing more of the in-game leading role now and I'm helping out with mid-round calls and sometimes, if I have anything I want to do, I'll tell him. Other than that, we switched some positions, if you watch the matches we've played you will see what we did differently. I think we switched something on all of the maps.

The first match here was on Train, a map you feel you should be good on, and you had a good start. Then I think it was oskar getting a few clutches that broke your momentum. Can you tell me, from your point of view, what happened on that map?

It's really hard to point out what happened on that map. We had 6-0 and they rushed out two times and I don't know if they clutched or they won it big, but we lost those round. I don't know if it was just us being unlucky or them doing something good but, honestly, it was the T side that we did pretty bad. Yeah, 8-7 after a 6-0 start on CT isn't good, but the T side was really bad.

So what do you think was the problem? I know that, I think it was 14-12, and you were doing a slow A execute, that they had you completely surrounded, pushing upper B, they had a total read on you. Was that something you felt in the game?

I feel like we only went to one place on our entire T side, we just went alley. I don't know why we kept forcing it, I think we lost because we tried to play slow and tried to focus on going alley and getting room there instead of playing like we usually do and try to outskill mousesports.

In the last match, you won against Heroic and you are now 1-1. It seemed like a straightforward game, how did it go from your perspective?

We got off to a good start, I think everyone felt like we are ready to play now instead of the first match, where we are always slow in the start. We had the money control after the first gun round win and then I clutched a 1-on-2 and we just had an easy time going into the sites.

After going 1-1, what are you looking forward to doing here in Cologne?

Playing more of course. Let's hope we get a good opponent for us and get out of the groups this time.