After the Natus Vincere team left the Intel Extreme Masters Sydney 2023, the coach of the Ukrainian organization Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy gave a great interview, where he shared his emotions, talked about the future and expressed his opinion about the players.
The first question, of course, was about what it was like for him to play, being a coach for the last five years:
It's a bit tense, nervous, but the emotions are pleasant. Every time you make a smart move, you feel really good inside. And there's not so much pressure and you don't blame yourself for mistakes so much.
Why couldn't you replace team sniper Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev with another pro player:
We approached ESL but were told we couldn't do stend-in. We tried to suggest some Australian players, but still nothing worked out. It wasn't until we flew here that we realized I would play for the team. With s1mple we only practiced CS 2 for three days. So it's not that we couldn't immerse ourselves in meta or anything like that. We're trying to learn every day.
What will happen with NAVI in the future?
We had a very good and first full bootcamp before EPL, we believed in it and said "Let's criticize ourselves, only after this bootcamp we can show something", we showed good results at EPL, won many games 2-0. IEM Sydney is not counting, as for CS2 we definitely need to be in another long bootcamp.
We just moved to international level and just trying to get our new players into the system, making moves and focusing on that.
How would you rate the performances of team riffler Justinas "jL" Lekavicius?
I think he played this tournament much more confident than usual, obviously he is not as experienced as s1mple or even b1t, and so sometimes you can see that he tries, believes.
But as an experienced player I can see that sometimes things won't work out, but I won't tell him that because I want him to go through this journey on his own and I don't want to break his confidence. I like his approach and personality. He's a very positive guy, always trying to create a good atmosphere in the team.
Recall that Natus Vincere at the Intel Extreme Masters Sydney 2023 were forced to play without the sniper of the team, as s1mple had problems with documents in Europe because of which he could not go to the tournament.
Recall that the NAVI team left the tournament in 9th-12th place. But their championship grid looked as follows:
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