The atmosphere of the Heroic game was one that should have been somber. However, it was full of high expectations for the future. A young Heroic team that has never played on a stage of this magnitude together felt they had put in their all into their final Major Legends Stage game. Away from the roaring crowd inside the Avicii Arena, I was able to speak to Rasmus “sjuush” Beck after his monster performance against G2. We caught up about the team’s mentality, goals for the future, and what he has to say to the Danish fans that supported him.
NiKo is quite a tough opponent in any game. Did you have a specific game plan for how to stop him?
I mean, not a specific game plan. They have two superstars, huNter- and NiKo, and I feel like we have five. We all can have a sick game and win us an entire match. So not specifically a game plan towards one player, we looked at the entire team – how they react to stuff, how they like to play and we have some good reads on them.
Your game plan is centered around you all being talented riflers. G2 has a similar playstyle because they have NiKo and huNter-. What is it like to play against that yourself?
We know some of the plays. We know, for example, huNter- on Mirage, he has some moves he likes to do, so we are prepared for those kind of moves. Same with Niko, we know he sometimes picks up an AWP out of nowhere and just calls himself around and wins some rounds by himself. We know those things.
Do you feel like underdogs?
Not really, we know what we are capable of. We know we can beat pretty much anyone, thats why I hope we would play in the Final because I felt like, fourth time is a charm against Navi and I felt like we should’ve won every single time. We didn’t feel outplayed when we played against Navi which is probably the best team in the world right now. We lost to ourselves and not really them being good, and we should have won one of those three other games we had. I was really hoping for a Final versus Navi.
Did you feel the Finals against Navi or Gambit were in your grasp? During the 28th or 29th round, you get those two kills top mid and you go 15-14. Did the finals feel right there?
We took one round at a time and we keep saying “keep our head calm”. Just keep calm in general because we don’t want to look too far ahead, that’s also why our goal for this tournament was top eight and then we moved it to top four. We just took one game at a time instead of just looking ahead of wanting to go to the Grand Finals and be disappointed. We rather want to look at one match at a time and that was what worked for us.
The crowd was crazy, they were erupting after every single play. Does that affect the way that you play the game?
No, not really. We heard the crowd cheering and we love CS. We know we gave some good CS to watch and before the match, we saw that there were many Danish fans, or just many fans in general cheering for us. Just when we entered the stage everyone was just yelling at us and it felt really nice. Couldn’t feel it while we were in game, I mean, it didn’t affect us in any bad way, only good because we like hearing the crowd as well.
Did the match going to overtime affect the team mentally?
We knew they had pretty bad money in the 15-14. They could still buy, but we knew they had around 4k’ish, not too much. So we thought “ok, we have a huge chance here to win”, but it didn’t affect us mentally when it went to overtime because we thought we had good money and we knew previous in the match that every single weapon round we lost against pistols. We lost to an eco and we didn’t win a single pistol round on Inferno. Mentally we were feeling good about the full buys.
Does anything need to change on Heroic for you to win the Major?
This was our first Major for four of us. First time playing on such a big stage and of course there were some nerves, we were a little bit nervous. I think we can be proud of what we did and it’s a learning curve as well and for a Major, we have been kinda bad playing at LAN. We knew we had it in us as well to play good on LAN and we showed that as well. It’s only about improving and we are going to watch every single match like we have done so far and just keep improving for now.
What was the mental attitude of the team coming out of that game?
I didn’t feel like anyone of us was super sad, I think it depends on how we lose because I feel like everyone gave 100%, 110% even. No one was sad, no one was tilting, we keep hyping each other up, we say good stuff to keep the mood up, we believe in each other and we believe what we are capable of. I mean, we are sad about losing, but we can be proud of what we have done.
Do you have anything to say to Danish fans in the arena or at home?
There’s been some insanely good fans screaming our names all the way in the back. It’s so fun to be a part of it and just every single fan in general. When we do good stuff we hear the whole arena just yelling. It’s such an amazing feeling and I never done that before, so being in front of like ten-thousand people is an experience.
