Following Mousesports’ incredible run in ESL One New York, Rush B Media was able to sit down with Robin “Ropz” Kool to talk about the final, the mentality of the final, and how it’s been climbing back from a disappointing Major.









Coming from the major you guys obviously did not have the best performance. What was your mentality and the team's mentality coming into this tournament right after that?





We bombed out of the major and we had some talks that it doesn't really matter what happened there, that it was just a group stage exit, and we didn't really take [the Major] that serious. It was just another group stage exit in a tournament, it was a major, but we tried to make it feel like it wasn't really that important and for the upcoming week we just practiced and to quote Chris “ChrisJ” de Jong for what he said right after the major, “Whatever happened here I feel like we can still win New York.” The next thing later, that's what happens.





You guys obviously having to now deal with going through the minor and looking at all the available options in terms of player roles coming out of the major, was that ever brought up into discussion coming after or were you guys constantly trying to get better with Snax in the team, working on communication, and working on those roles that you have right now?





We didn't really discuss anything like that during the major about roles or anything. I feel like we just had some mistakes in every action that we did and that's what costed us the games back then. We just practiced and tried to fix the small things and I think that in the end it just helped us.





Onto the final, you win the first map, going one up, but then you lose Nuke which was your map pick. Having to deal with losing your map pick and being 1-1 with another possible 3 maps, what is the mentality within the team and how do you reset yourself having lost close games or games that you felt you should have won?





Personally, I didn't do that much. I just took a break from the match for 5-10 minutes to just sit down and think about what happened and the rest I just focus on the next game, along with the team with what we're going to do and what they're going to do. If it goes to a fifth map then it's really funny because in the end it just feels like a best-of-one at this point because it's just the map that you have to win if you want to win the tournament.





You guys went down 1-2 and you guys were sort of facing the mountain. Did you still try to think of them all as best-of-ones, trying to take each map as it was?





When we were down 1-2, it was Dust2 and they were actually leading really hard on us with a really great T-side and I didn't have a great game in the beginning and I honestly thought "this was it, we're going to lose". Obviously, I'm not going to show it to my teammates and I'm still trying my best, but personally I didn't feel that great in the beginning of the map. I think we had a great comeback on the T-side and I think that is why Liquid lost this tournament - because of that loss and I think they should have won that. We made some good rounds and we just outplayed them on the T-side and made our comeback in overtime to make it to the fifth map.





When you have that kind of momentum, after winning Dust2, how do you then try and work timeouts into countering your opponent's momentum? One of the most curious things that I saw was Liquid never really seemed to use their timeouts. They never really seemed to want to use them when you guys were on a roll. Were you expecting them to try and use timeouts to try to stop your momentum?





Generally, you usually try to take [a timeout] as late as possible so maybe they take it earlier then us and we get a free timeout for ourselves. I don't know if it was bad that they didn't take timeouts, maybe it was at the end of Mirage because we had won the pistol round and we took a timeout ourselves to discuss what was going to happen now, and in the end we actually lost that round, but came back on the force-buy I think. I think, generally, timeouts can help you, they can reset the mentality a bit, and I think that at the end of Mirage they should've taken one timeout or two to discuss somethings, but they played a lot of fast rounds and we closed it out on Mirage.





The last question I do want to ask you, I was very curious to why you guys did take that timeout after winning the pistol. Was that kind of you guys thinking of your next steps to close out Mirage?





We won the pistol round and before that we said we would timeout if we won, so that is what happened. The coach reminded us what they do saying "They can do an A execute, they can do a B execute, just go mid somehow, or just buy deagles and do whatever and run around". What happened was that they went B and the round was really close, but we lost it when I had 1 second on the defuse. So that's what happened in the timeout, we just discussed about ever possibility of things they could do.