Natus Vincere may have fallen to Vitality in the quarter-finals of PGL Masters Bucharest, but their campaign in Romania saw them earn a playoff berth for the first time since winning IEM Atlanta and returned notable wins over Spirit and FURIA.
Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy revealed to HLTV after his team's elimination that they didn't need to rock the boat to see improvements. "We were constantly working on the same stuff," he said. "It was just the executing of protocols and ideas was not that sharp, because this can come with mindset, this can come with your confidence, right? Because everything we have, it's there."
Fresh from a top-eight finish in Bucharest, B1ad3's talk with HLTV covered their tournament run in-depth and the reasons behind their early-season struggles and recent improvements.
You can listen to the interview here.
So first, commiserations. Let's talk through that series start to finish. Cache obviously a very, very good map for you. Why do you think you were able to be so successful on Cache?
We prepped it a lot, but we couldn't pick it because, for example, we didn't play it for a while. If you're focused on the first two days on some other maps, you need to trust something that you basically sharpened somewhere else, because you already did it last day. So yeah, we really just controlled the meta, studied the meta, analyzing, upgrading our knowledge on this map. And we played it yesterday also. We felt it was very good, so that's why we picked it.
And there was no doubts picking it into Vitality who are also quite good on Cache? You were still confident either way?
I checked how they played Cache before, and they're playing a little bit FACEIT style on T side. There's not a lot of structure. People just go around trying to kill, finding entries, and if you don't stop them in terms of firepower, you can lose a lot of duels and it'll be really hard to play CT side if you pick this map. But we felt pretty confident yesterday on CT side versus Spirit, and that gave us confidence. CT side versus Spirit was very good yesterday. We were, I think, 8-4, 9-3, something like this. So that's why we were ready today to do some moves.
We knew how they play. We push B, for example, kill ropz and ZywOo. And also obviously we knew that we would start T side, and T side is dominating on this map. And that's why it was also part of this plan, because when they pick it and we start CT side, then they can feel confident, they can create a game plan, and that's why we removed it last time, for example, versus them.
Obviously the next two maps were not so good. What do you think went wrong on Mirage and Dust2?
I think we had chances on both maps, but as soon as you give Vitality this confidence boost or economy boost, they start cooking rounds with more random effect, where people can just guess and kill and just YOLO. They don't really think a lot about this. And if you saw how ZywOo was playing, he was sometimes pushing, solo dying on CT side. We need to punish them for this basically.
That's why, on Mirage for example, we were not on point like versus Spirit yesterday on CT side. We were not fighting together. Versus these kind of teams you need like 5% more, 10% more of clarity in what you're doing, of synergy in what you're doing, and communicating a lot, and your brain must work on full potential, on full power. And I don't know, energy went down there. I don't know why. I felt it so clearly on CT side.
I know how we can play, how to discuss usually the fights that were there. We were doing very bad fights at the end of the round. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but even the round that they won going B, it was five versus three or four versus two. You just need more communication, not hurrying up, and that was the thing I saw, that energy kind of went down and we were not so active. We were not so sharp in our synergy.
Everyone is a little bit one by one trying to kill, but Vitality is good at this. When you're trying to kill them, they can also have good individual moves and firepower. So this for sure, CT side was our main problem on Mirage, because I think it could have been 8-4, 9-3.
Same was for T side, we were not ourselves. They played good, but we need to figure out how to activate this mode of our team when we are more in the flow, more in the reaction mode, and much sharper with each other, doing good way points at the end of the round, where they don't get multi kills.
On T side Mirage we also had good situations. We were out A freezing, not taking space sometimes. There were some rounds also that were equal, 3 to 2, 2 to 2, and at this point we were struggling a lot. And this is one of the things that we must improve and work on.
Across the tournament in general though, it feels like this is a better version of NAVI than we've seen for a couple of months. What's your assessment of the tournament overall?
We already activated at EPL, we had a very good tournament at EPL. It was kind of clean 2-0 versus 9z and G2, pretty confident I mean. And it already showed us that it's a different team to us, to ourselves. And we won like one map versus Vita, one map versus Falcons. We were still struggling, but we already saw that we are in the right direction, we are a different team.
Versus PARIVISION it was, from my point of view, a full disaster because we should've won them, and we knew how to win them, and we started to hesitate, being nervous, afraid to lose, and eventually they just played their style and beat us.
That was... for example I saw we already played good versus 9z, versus G2 and other teams, and I saw how we can play, and we didn't do it versus PARIVISION. And it's strange because this is not a very strong star player team which can slip you down with their status or something. So that was a little bit of a sloppy situation because it kind of moved us one step back. We thought it would be: play Spodek and give us even more confidence.
Then we just transitioned from that to this tournament with the same understanding, that we can play good teams. We are playing much better now, and we proved it here, basically. We had very tough opponents. We had G2, FURIA, Spirit, Vitality. BETBOOM played very good, but, I don't know, versus BETBOOM I think we could also win. They are in very good shape now. And they are doing very good stuff on the map, moving as a team, great firepower. And they're kind of equal on a lot of maps.
So that was a tough opponent, but I still think that, again, if you compare the game BETBOOM, PARIVISION, for me it was a little bit the same problem, because we are not playing our game. Where we can win, usually we are not doing this. We are again stagnating, or become stiff and not moving, and they were doing the opposite. This is an important skill.
So we can always learn from our mistakes. We can take the games and analyze what our improvements, weaknesses, strengths are on the distance. And you can see already what we need to work on. So it's very helpful for us, these losses, like versus BETBOOM and versus PARI. And versus Vita, I think, like I said, if you give them too much confidence, they're a different team.
What do you think the biggest difference is that's seen you improve? Is there one thing you can identify in your game that has seen you step up at EPL and now here compared to earlier in the season?
We didn't change anything, we were constantly working on the same stuff. It was just the executing of protocols and ideas was not that sharp, because this can come with mindset, this can come with your confidence, right? Because everything we have, it's there. We play seven maps. It was very good vetos this tournament, we did like full unexpected. And we basically just upgraded our knowledge, constantly doing the same. It's something like keep trying until you activate, because if you're losing, you need always to improve.
The main problem is if you are not improving, if you are thinking, you are desperate, you are frustrated, you don't believe in anything. But this is the main point, this is real: you're gaining some knowledge, trying to use this knowledge during the match. If it doesn't work, you're just fixing it and not going... being realistic basically. And I think maybe that will help us a lot, just keep, how people say, trust the process, right? Just basically trusting the process and constantly improving, improving, improving.
For sure one thing helped us a lot, the wins. Because when you don't play a lot and you're losing, you start to hesitate, your thoughts kind of go like this. So yeah, the wins were very important. At EPL when we started to win, everyone fought for those wins and it helped us a lot.
FURIA
Gabriel 'FalleN' Toledo
Yuri 'yuurih' Santos
Mareks 'YEKINDAR' Gaļinskis
Kaike 'KSCERATO' Cerato
Danil 'molodoy' Golubenko
Sid 'sidde' Macedo
Vitality
Dan 'apEX' Madesclaire
Robin 'ropz' Kool
Mathieu 'ZywOo' Herbaut
Shahar 'flameZ' Shushan
William 'mezii' Merriman
Rémy 'XTQZZZ' Quoniam
Andrey 'B1ad3' Gorodenskiy
Spirit
Dmitry 'sh1ro' Sokolov
Boris 'magixx' Vorobiev
Andrey 'tN1R' Tatarinovich
Myroslav 'zont1x' Plakhotia
Danil 'donk' Kryshkovets
Sergey 'hally' Shavaev
Natus Vincere
Aleksi 'Aleksib' Virolainen
Mihai 'iM' Ivan
Valeriy 'b1t' Vakhovskiy
Ihor 'w0nderful' Zhdanov
Drin 'makazze' Shaqiri
Andrey 'B1ad3' Gorodenskiy