B1ad3: “We always must be capable of finding our balance, we call it optimal battle mode”

Natus Vincere have set up a quarter-final battle against G2 in ESL Pro League Season 16 after coming out on top of a drawn-out affair versus Heroic on Wednesday. The series began in thrilling fashion as the teams won their own map picks with narrow margins, but tech issues on map three killed the momentum of the match, with Natus Vincere eventually claiming a blowout win nearly six hours after things first began.

After the game came to an end, Freya briefly spoke to Andrey “⁠B1ad3⁠” Gorodenskiy on the ESL broadcast to touch on the veto for the match, as well as how the team mentally recovered from the lengthy pauses. She also questioned the coach regarding his opinion on G2, who NAVI will face on Friday at 19:00 .

B1ad3, first of all, huge congratulations on that win. I know it’s been a long night for you so I won’t keep you for long. I want to talk about the map veto first of all, because it was kind of a surprise to see you guys banning out Nuke in that second wave. Can you give me some of the logic behind that, what was the reasoning?

Heroic is a really good team on Nuke, and we knew that they would choose Overpass. We’re more confident on our Overpass, especially our CT side, and we think we can outaim Heroic on this map if we are on fire because the map is different, it’s not such close duels. I think we just feel more confident versus Heroic in duels.

Obviously I’m not going to ignore the elephant in the room, we had to experience that unfortunate delay for the players coming into this game as well. As the coach coming into that third map of Overpass when we were able to resume the game, how do you make sure the players are still feeling it, still igniting that fire, because it seemed like you guys were confident going into the latter stages of that map?

It’s very hard for any player, you’re very tilted after the round with jabbi on banana. We work a lot on this with our performance coach, with our psychologist, before the game, during our practices. We always must be capable of finding our balance, we call it optimal… let’s say like when you go to battle, your battle mode, you need to have your optimal battle mode. You must know how to do this always, you must be professional.

I want to get your thoughts on your next opponent, G2, who kind of surprised us all by having that flawless run in the groups. Were you surprised to see them performing so well considering the changes they’ve recently made?

G2 are really nice. From what I saw, Vitality was in good shape, and now they had more time to prepare more things. G2 was really confident also. G2 are a team that plays a lot from confidence, NiKo, huNter-, they didn’t win a lot of trophies, but they thrive for this, they’re really hungry for trophies. The potential for them is there to win, these type of players are the ones who can win trophies, like m0NESY, NiKo, huNter-, so I think it’s more about this, I think they are now in a momentum.