EliGE: "We're ready to win this whole thing"

We've caught up with the Liquid rifler as he and his team continued their journey through the Major.

EliGE is plotting his way through the next stage

During the media day for the New Legends stage of the FACEIT London Major, Michael "Duck" Moriarty had a quick chat with Jonathan "EliGE" Jablonowski about how his team battled through the tournament so far, and his expectations for the remainder of the tournament.

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Through the New Challengers Stage last week with the 3-0 record. What are your thoughts on that journey? Was it what you expected to do, or did it exceed your initial expectations?

I think that it's been pretty expected for us so far. We had a really good bootcamp, where we felt really strong coming out of it. All of our maps feel really great, a lot better than they were before the break, I just think that the time we took off in-between the player break and now has really paid dividends, and is paying off right now.

When I spoke to a couple of your teammates last week, they mentioned that the break after events was important. Was it important for you to get away from playing the game in a competitive environment and just purely focusing on tactics and strategy?

I think it's extremely important, for you to actually be able to actually fix the mistakes that you've been making in tournaments and create new ideas it is extremely important. If you're playing two, or three, or four tournaments in a row, which we've done in the past, you get really stale and we end up just adding or fixing a couple things here and there. We can't really do extensive work on that, and I think that's the biggest problem with it. If you actually have that time where you have a practice schedule and you're only focused on fixing your mistakes and adding new things, you can get a lot more done when it's focused on practice instead of just trying to find time in between a busy schedule.

So far in the tournament you yourself have had a quite good performance. How does you performing at a top level help your teammates also look for a high level of performance?

I think it just makes everybody confident when we see each other playing really well. If I see my teammate making really huge plays or getting the kills he always should be, or making the right support plays for each other I think it really elevates the confidence on everybody and keep everyone wanting to strive for more.

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Your first game in the Legends stage will be against Winstrike. They're a team who haven't done too much in the past six months since the previous Major, does that make it a slightly more difficult game to come up against a team you haven't had much to view of?

Yeah, it's actually kind of the same thing as when we came up against Vega Squadron. They basically don't have anything in the past month or two, I mean they have some maps from two months ago but people can change a lot of stuff in that timeframe. As they didn't play in anything since the break, it does make it a little bit difficult to prepare for them. But the confidence of us coming out of our bootcamp and the last week, I think that we're feeling really good about everything and we're just making sure that our game plan is on point, we have the pistols that we want to do, the ecos, everything like that is all ready to go.

So you're confident to come up against Winstrike?

Yeah we're very confident to come up against Winstrike in the first round.

Finally, you have another stage of Swiss to go in to. What are your goals for it, are you expecting another 3-0 or are you expecting to just get through to the playoffs?

Of course the goal is to advance, no matter what. Obviously we don't want to lose, and we want to go 3-0, especially if we face Astralis in a later round and take the game off them, that would really boost our confidence going into the playoffs. I think that would be really great for us. But if we lose one or two maps, it's not going to be the end of the world, it's not going to destroy our confidence as we're still ready to win this whole thing. That is what our goal is.

EliGE and Liquid defeated Winstrike earlier today and entered the 1-0 pot for the next round of Swiss. They have drawn Ninjas in Pyjamas tomorrow, in a match that is optimistically set to start at 12:30 EDT.