Although 18 of the 24 IEM Cologne teams made changes coming into the event, G2 were not one of them. Potentially a surprise given their downturn in form following their win at IEM Katowice, the organization decided to stick by their roster in hope of a return to their trophy winning ways.<\/p>\n
After their opening win against Astralis, we sat down with Rasmus “HooXi” Nielsen to discuss the victory, picking up momentum, and backroom changes in the team.<\/p>\n
Sam ‘\u009cAN1MO’\u009d McKenzie, BLIX: A close game there against Astralis, how does it feel to get the win?<\/strong><\/p>\n HooXi: <\/strong>Good, it feels good to win. That’s something we haven’t been that good at lately [laughs]. I’m not that happy about our T side on Ancient, I feel like I had a really good read on them and a good plan, but somehow we didn’t execute it correctly and then we had a bit of a tough time closing out Nuke as well. We need to look at why we are so momentum based, right now, we struggle a bit, we always start like 5-1 and then the half ends 9-6 to the other team. Definitely something we need to look at.<\/p>\n BLIX: Astralis are a new team, what’s your take on them after their changes?<\/strong><\/p>\n HooXi: <\/strong>I think that they might be a new team, but that’s not a bad thing, a lot of people value sticking together in CS a lot and that we have been together a year is a huge advantage. But it’s also an advantage for them that we don’t have a lot of games to watch and also that everything is new and nice for them of course, there’s good mood no matter what. With us, it’s like being married for a long time, if we fuck up a round maybe we feel a bit worse [laughs]. I think they look good and honestly, better than I thought. It’s impressive that device is having this form after not being in the game for such a long time.<\/p>\n BLIX: You mentioned you guys sticking together, after the end of the season, did you think that you might have made a change?<\/strong><\/p>\n HooXi: <\/strong>I think that it wouldn’t have been weird if we did, but it’s just up to the organisation to look at whether they think we have what it takes and I think we showed at the start of the year that we have the pieces and it’s just about making it click and a few percentages. I’m happy with the trust, of course, and hopefully we will show here in Cologne that it was worth it.<\/p>\n BLIX: Your confidence seemed a little broken after Paris, and you recently parted ways with Edward Cleland [MindBodyEsports], can you tell me more about that decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n HooXi: <\/strong>That’s of course the organization’s decision, but I think that even though we learnt a lot from Edward, we still could maybe learn something new from a new guy. It’s like when you get a new player in the team, you learn a lot of new tricks and stuff like this, so I don’t know if we felt like getting something new, but I think that it was also bringing a lot and you could see when he came in the team that it only took one event for us and then we started winning.<\/p>\n BLIX: You had a slow start to the season, but are you feeling like you’re getting up to speed now?<\/strong><\/p>\n HooXi:<\/strong> I think it takes a bit more than one best of three [laughs]. But for sure, if we start rolling in this tournament then we know that, being a momentum based team, it can be both a blessing and a curse, and if we start rolling, it will be tough for any opponent to stop us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although 18 of the 24 IEM Cologne teams made changes coming into the event, G2 were not one of them. Potentially a surprise given their downturn in form following their win at IEM Katowice, the organization decided to stick by their roster in hope of a return to their trophy winning ways. After their opening<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":14920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14919","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cs-2"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}