Nightshare: “We want to show how much better we are” than NA

We spoke to Fnatic’s head coach Tomáš “Nightshare” Kněžínek, after the Gen.G defeat.

The 3-0 loss to Korean giants Gen.G resigned Fnatic to the Mid-Season Invitational’s lower bracket. Despite a well-fought series with three close matches, the Europeans ultimately failed to register a single win and now must fight for their lives against North America’s Team Liquid to stave off elimination.

Esports.net: What are your immediate thoughts on the series?

Nightshare: Well, I’m pretty happy with the performance we showed. Obviously, game two was pretty close. That came down to execution – a simple team fight can go either way and the team could win, and Gen.G is really good at team fighting.

Game three, I’m actually very happy with how we pulled the whole strat and everything. Sadly, we’ve been in the driving seat, but we did quite huge mistakes on bot lane and we couldn’t snowball from the early game we had. So sadly that also happens if you want to compete on the international stage, you are not allowed to make these mistakes and we did them, so we lost.

What was the message to the players following game one, after they had fought to stay level only to have the game ended immediately off of a single play?

Nightshare: Well, they are pretty mature players, most of them, so they know themselves. That moment that you’re actually talking about, we have the zone, we have the setup – they actually have no vision on us and we just do a very poor mistake of not playing with the zone. That’s something that was kind of our habit. So it’s kind of old habits die hard.

They had no vision at all and we just went mid and gave them a teamfight, right?

So for them, it was like: “Yeah, what? Let’s go next. We can beat them because we played pretty head-to-head”.

Lee Jones: In both losses in the tournament there’s been a sense that Fnatic has matched up confidently against Eastern competition despite being on the losing end both times.

What’s the mood like now between the players?

Nightshare: The most important now is don’t get discouraged by losing, because the way I see it, the only way we lose or we will perform worse is if we get emotionally unstable and we kind of lose our good mood, good vibes, confidence, how we play and everything. So we will focus mainly on that. I will just repeat again that I’m actually pretty happy with how we played today.

How are you looking forward to facing Team Liquid next?

It will be spicy EU NA matchup, which we are all really looking forward to because we want to show how much better we are.

Lee Jones: The debate around Korean imports has returned after SK’s rumoured bot lane changes.

What do you make of that discourse given that Fnatic has two Korean imports of its own?

Nightshare: It really depends on the market in the moment and what you want to achieve, who you want in your team personality-wise also. I wouldn’t say that it’s something to blame or dislike. If the team just chooses to go with Korean imports and they think it’s the best, why not? What the community doesn’t see actually is that a lot of the teams are always considering the EU options first and then if it doesn’t fit completely well, then you’re considering other options. I don’t really know what SK needs. I knew that they had issues with bot lane, so I was expecting some sort of a change. If they decided to go this way, I would just wait and then let them see.

Also, the community, I think, doesn’t see at all that a lot of these Korean imports are actually very cheap and cost value-wise it’s very, very beneficial to go for these people when a lot of the EU botlaners are under contract. The contracts are way, way more huge and there is a buy out. So there is so much to consider.

Lee Jones: There’s a perception that Humanoid reaches a different level at international events, while perhaps finding it difficult to maintain the same hunger in the LEC.

What are your thoughts on his regional versus international performances?

I honestly believe everyone does [have more motivation internationally] because it’s something different and it’s something bigger, it’s something better. So everyone gets more motivated and maybe he just shows it a bit more than others.

Secondly, he’s playing this game for a long time, so it will always be that maybe sometimes you’re just not feeling it so well, and you’re not that motivated. And it’s just it’s always like a roller coaster in every player, not just Marek. It’s just managing the motivation, managing the burnout and everything.

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