mousesports became champions at V4 Future Sports Festival following a 2-1 win over Virtus.pro, exchanging the first two maps, Mirage and Cobblestone, before it came down to Train in a nerve-wracking finish.

oskar claimed his second MVP medal at V4

After the triumph, we sat down with Tomáš "⁠oskar⁠" Šťastný, who received his second MVP medal in Budapest, and asked him about the team's run at the tournament.

Let's start with the semi-final, which ended up being very close, did you expect HellRaisers to be such a tough matchup?

We did expect that result, because they beat us the last two or three times, and in practice we played them once and they destroyed us pretty much. So we knew they were playing well, we didn't underestimate them, we were ready, but we expected a close match.

Touching on the final, what happened on Cobblestone, why weren't you able to put up much of a fight?

I don't know, when we practiced VP on Cobble they wrecked us the same way, it was maybe 16-2, so we went into it thinking we could pull off a miracle and win, since we used to beat them often. We tried that, but unfortunately nothing was working, there were times where one round or even one kill could determine the outcome of the next three rounds, we were just completely off.

Train was a super close affair, you had to come back from a 12-14 deficit, how was the morale in the team at that point when you could have lost if you dropped only one round?

After they won the second eco, the mood went down, it was a little depressing, I knew we were going to lose another pistol, so it was pretty bad. We should have held better, but then we said we should enjoy the next few rounds and try to come back. We stayed strong mentally and we did it, but it was a thrill.

Do you remember some specific round where you thought you could actually pull it off in the end?

No, but I remember a round where I thought it was over, and that was when they got B in the eco towards the end and we were on A, so at that point it would have gone to 15 and that was nerve-wracking.

This is your second MVP in the last half a year, your second title with mousesports this year, are you feeling personally, and team-wise, at your peak?

It's great to win our second tournament in a short time, everyone's confidence got a boost ahead of a lot of tournaments, we have Marseille, Sydney, and hopefully EPL and ECS if we qualify. That's great, we know we can play in front of the audience in the finals, we proved ourselves even against the crowd in Kiev, so that's a positive thing, I think we're going to be strong. It's all good.

We saw eXtatus and Dark Tigers here, two teams from the local scene, what do you think about these teams getting a chance to show themselves?

I think it's great, at least everyone can see CS is quite even, any team can beat or tie with a team like HellRaisers on a good day, like Dark Tigers did. I wished Dark Tigers well, I liked how they played. I perhaps expected eXtatus to even advance, but it's good they had a chance to play at a tournament like this and try it out.