After disappointment at BLAST Premier Spring Final presented by Revolut, SAW are coming into IEM Cologne 2024 with a point to prove, and they opened up their event with a big win over The Mongolz.
After the game, we spoke to ewjerkz about the development of the team, working with BERRY, and how much the win means to them.
We’re not used to [starting with a win]Michel "ewjerkz" Magalhães
A tough series to open your time at IEM Cologne but you got the win in the end, how are you feeling?
I'm feeling very good, it's good for us to start off with a win, we're not really very used to that. We always lose our first match, so it's really nice to win especially against a team that plays really good CS.
The series looked like it could go either way after the first two maps, what happened on the third for it to be so one-sided in your favour?
We could have won on the second map, we know how they would play. I called a round where I thought they'd play slow B, but they rushed and it broke our economy so it was hard to come back from there.
On the third it was easy to control Mid, we had the whole map and we just had to make the right call towards the end of each round.
The MongolZ have been playing well for a while, how much of a confidence boost is it to the team to beat them?
Whoever we played winning was always going to be a very nice confidence boost. It's nice that it was them because they're very good, so that makes us more confidence for the upcoming games.
You've been working with BERRY as your coach for a few months now, how is that developing?
He's the best coach I have ever had, he's very good at everything. We talk a lot about situations in-game and we fix a lot, I really like working with him.
What about the language difficulties? How are you getting around that?
We always speak English outside of the game so he's always on the inside of whatever is happening, he just doesn't understand our comms inside of the game. However, if he doesn't understand and feels like he needs to he can just ask and we can explain so he can understand and help.
At BLAST Spring Final in London you played some big teams, how will you be more prepared for them if you face them here?
We'll have the same preparation, the big difference is just that BLAST was the end of the season so we were all a bit tired, but now we have our full energy and we are a lot better as a result.
With that said, where do you think you're at as a team currently in terms of your ranking?
We can beat many teams, good teams, but we can also lose to a lot of them and by a lot. If it doesn't go well, we struggle.
Do you think you just need more LAN experience to find consistency?
We are much better now on LAN than we were before, we used to be very bad on LAN. However, we can play our game on LAN now so I think we're very good.
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