After G2 was eliminated from ESL One Cologne by Natus Vincere in the quarter-finals, we sat down with the team's in-game leader Richard "shox" Papillon to hear about the team's biggest struggles and what they need to fix before the Major.

The French have continued with their trend of up-and-down results, finishing 5-8th in Cologne after going 3-0 in the PGL Krakow Major Main Qualifier. In Germany, G2 dropped only one map before the playoffs, losing Cache to NiP, but fell to Natus Vincere 2-0 in the first match of the playoffs.

shox will not have fond memories of ESL One Cologne 2017

Talking to Richard "⁠shox⁠" Papillon, we heard about his team's struggles with closing matches, mentality issues and facing SK.

In the group stage, you faced SK and beat them on Inferno. Historically you had a good matchup against them, currently, you are 5-1 in maps. Can you tell me why do you think you have more success than most teams do? About the success against them, I don't really know, I just think we just kind of feel with the way they play. We kind of know stuff they love to do. We had a good start on Inferno here, but we could've put up way more round coming up to the T side. They had the double AWP setup and we could not really deal with it, especially on the B site, where FalleN really picked up a lot of kills. And we had of lot of stuff going wrong, the smokes were bad, the flashes were bad... And when you don't have the good stuff against an AWP it's kind of hard. Coming up to the CT, I think we played a good game overall, but honestly we won the match with all the clutches we won. All the 2-on-2's, 3-on-3 retakes... We played those rounds really good and we won it. And when you win clutches like this it's way better, especially on the CT side, because of the money. I guess, if they would've had one or two clutches, then we wouldn't have so good of an economy and it would be a totally different game. Moving on to the quarterfinals, you drew against Na`Vi, for the start tell me about the veto phase and the map pool coming in. What did you expect, what did you hope for? Coming up to the veto we were expecting to play Train because we were thinking they would pick it. We knew we would pick Nuke because they would veto some other map and we didn't expect Cobblestone as the third because I guess it's our best map so we were expecting them to just veto it. So yeah, we were pretty confident with the map pool we got. We didn't expect them to pick Overpass, even though it's kind of their best map, but we are kind of confident on it. And we just threw the match I guess, something like this. Even though we were confident with the map pool, I knew it would be a really hard match because Na`Vi is not a team I'm used to playing. I mean, I don't even remember when we played them the last time. And when you are not used to playing a team, it's totally different, you don't know how it will work, what are good solutions... It's the first match we played against them in months and months, so it makes it kind of 50-50 I would say. Is that mostly your style, as an in-game leader, that you like to play against teams that you are more familiar with? Before the Major qualifier, SmithZz mentioned that you struggle against "lower teams", teams that are not that known. Is that a similar kind of struggle to the one you had against Na`Vi, not knowing them? It's not really the same I guess, because the problems we have when we face tier 2 or 3 teams, we sometimes just underestimate them, and we should not do that because they are really good. In those matches, we don't really play our game. Players in their heads kind of think that it's already a win, we have a big problem with it. So it's not really the same problem as when we play against Na`Vi.

G2 sometimes underestimate opposition, but that didn't happen at the Major Qualifier